Despite battling a cold, I was pretty much able to pick up where I left off a year ago in Vision Quest Coaching’s CompuTrainer Time Trial held Saturday at Vision Quest’s lovely Highland Park facility. This year, instead of hosting an entire indoor time trial series, the Vision Quest team held a one-day event that is now a part of the American Bicycle Racing’s Mid-American Time Trial Series (MATTS). The course was the challenging Cholet Time Trial course from stage 4 of the 2008 Tour de France. Even with some of the more extreme grades and abrupt changes in grade smoothed out a bit, it is still a tough course, and the format which ranks riders based on the amount of distance they can cover in 30 minutes means that instead of being rewarded for a strong performance by finishing more quickly, everyone is forced to push as hard as they can for the full 30 minutes.

Cholet CompuTrainer Course Profile Used in VQ TT

My first ride was in the Masters 40+ class, and I managed to cover 12.35 miles, good enough for the best ride of that heat, and, it turns out, good enough for the most distance covered all day. I was riding next to Mike Jones of PACT, doing his second ride of the day, who managed to step it up to 11.91 miles to capture the Open 1, 2 and 3 class and the  fourth best ride of the day. My second ride was in the Masters 30+ class, and I managed to cover 12.12 miles, which was good enough to win the class and third best distance of the day.

The story of the heat was the battle I had with Dan Verner of PACT who put on a stellar performance racing in the Masters 40+ class. Dan and I were pretty much neck-and-neck throughout the first 20 minutes with him finally taking the lead for good on that climb up out of the hole at the 15K mark. To be fair, I had the advantage of knowing that I had the distance to beat for the 40+ class from my earlier ride, so I didn’t want to push Dan so hard that he ended up eclipsing my distance to win the class. He ended up with the second best ride of the day, covering 12.23 miles in 30 minutes.

It was nice to be able to place well in my first races as a member of my new team, Lamb Little Racing. Directeur Sportif Reed Oliff along with Jayson Torres and Doug Peterson all put in good performances. As usual, Doug also has an excellent write-up of the event on his blog.

For the record, during my first ride, I managed to average 378 watts, giving me 4.27 watts/kg.  Now, the humbling thing is that Bob Weeks of Vision Quest had a printout showing power numbers for pro cyclist David Millar of Garmin Slipstream when he rode the actual Cholet TT to a third-place finish in 2008. Millar averaged 397 watts for an average speed of 30.5 miles per hour over the full 29.3K course. Here’s the thing: Millar only weighed 168 lbs., so his watts/kg worked out to 5.2. So, I would say I’ve still got plenty of room to improve both on the numerator and the denominator of the watts/kilogram equation.

Full results are available on the American Bicycle Racing website.

The season ended tonight for St. Hilary as they lost to a very good St. Clement team. After falling behind 11-0 in the first quarter, the Cardinals started strong in the second quarter, scoring 8 points and playing much improved defense. In the third quarter, they were able to hold St. Clement to only 2 baskets but were unable to score themselves. In the fourth quarter, St. Clement was once again on fire with their shooting and ran away with the game to finish with a resounding 32-9 victory.

Hayley led the Cardinals in scoring with 3 points while Alice, Gaby and Jessi each added two points.

St. Clement remains unbeaten and proceeds on to the semi-final game a week from tonight, while St. Hilary closes out its season with a 9-10 record.

While the season ended too soon for the Cardinals, we were pleased with their progress this year and appreciate all the great work the McQuires did coaching them this season. They have a great foundation to build upon for next year.

Following fast upon the heels of the final regular season game of the year, St. Hilary kicked off the NCPL playoffs tonight with a 31-16 victory over Frances Xavier Warde. Gaby scored 17 points, and Sammi added 10.

While the Cardinals won fairly easily against last-place FXW, they will have to play a much better game against an unbeaten St. Clement team this coming Thursday evening. In their only meeting of the season back on December 18, St. Hilary lost 29-14 to a powerful St. Clement team, after falling behind 17-3 at the half. Let’s hope the Cardinals can put it all together and play a great game on Thursday.

With the win, St. Hilary evens its season record once again at 9-9, while FXW ended the season 0-15 in the NCPL.

St. Benedict demonstrated today why they are one of the best teams in the North Central Parish League, with a shooting exhibition against St. Hilary. The Cardinals played a much better game than they did in their season-opening loss to a St. Benedict team that outscored them 31-5 back on November 20, but it still wasn’t enough to stop this impressive Bengals team.

Leading the way for the Cardinals were Gaby with 8 points and Alice with 7 points. This was Alice’s highest scoring game yet, and she was responsible for St. Hilary’s first 7 points of the game. This game was closer than the score indicates. If St. Hilary had been able to convert a few more of the nice looks they got in near the basket, they would have made quite a contest of it, but they just weren’t getting enough of those shots to drop today.

St. Hilary finishes the regular season with an 8-9 record while St. Benedict improved to 11-4. Coming off a 5-day stretch in which they played the two best teams in their division, let’s hope the St. Hilary girls are prepared to make a good showing in the playoffs which start this week.

After their collapse against top-ranked Queen of Angels 0n Wednesday night, the Cardinals played a great game tonight. Gaby knocked down 14 points, scoring almost at will in the paint, while Jessi tallied 8 assists, which is a record for a team that used to go for quarter after quarter without an assist. Alice was 2 for 8 from the floor.  She had a couple of great steals in the passing lane out above the key which she turned into nice fast breaks.  Unfortunately, they weren’t able to convert on either of those two fast breaks, but it was fun to watch.

St. Hilary evened its record at 8-8 on the season with one regular season game remaining this coming Sunday against the powerful St. Benedict team, while Academy of the Sacred Heart closed out its regular season at 1-14.

Queen of Angels proved why they are one of the top teams in the North Central Parish League, with a strong showing against St. Hilary tonight. St. Hilary battled back from 0-6 first quarter to tie the game up at the beginning of the third quarter, only to suffer a total collapse as Queen of Angels found their shooting touch and played great defense to outscore the Cardinals 18-2 the rest of the way.

With the win, Queen of Angels closed out the regular season with a record of 13-2 in the NCPL while St. Hilary falls to 7-8 overall with two games left.

Today was the second MATTS/ROTY ABD 10K Indoor TT, the rolling course. I was much happier with my performances today than in those at the first race a month ago. I ended up with the second fastest time of the day, complete the rolling 10k in 14:22.19 minutes, with Will Nowak once again recording the fastest time at 14:16.46. Surprisingly, my fastest time was on the second ride of the day. On my first ride, racing in the 30+ division, I got stuck in the small chainring and found myself spinning out on the downhill portions of the course. I don’t know if I could have beaten Will for the fastest time had this not occurred, but I am certain I would have been able to record a better time than the 14:35.80 that I ended up with for the 30+. Mark Swartezendruber ended up edging me out for 1st in that age category with a 14:26.18.

Full results can be found here (caution, this link opens a PDF file).

Update: Once more, Doug Peterson provides an excellent wrap-up on his site.  I think that I may be the person that he heard about when he mentions having heard about some rider having “dropped a chain in the middle of their battle against the machine.” Not quite a dropped chain in the normal sense, but annoying nevertheless.  I need to adjust my derailleurs a bit before the next race:-)

After eeking out a 1-point victory in their first meeting of the season, the St. Hilary girls didn’t leave anything to chance in this rematch with Pope John XXIII, handily winning 19-12. Gaby once again led the way with 10 points while Sammi and Jessi each tallied 4.

The victory evens the St. Hilary record for the season at 7-7.

Welcome to my new (old) blog.

Let me try to explain why I say, “Welcome in Medias Res.” I think it has been about four years since I stopped regularly writing a personal blog, although I have been doing bits and pieces of business blogging and other writing online during this period. I have written a lot of stuff about a wide range of topics over the years, so one thing that I plan to do fairly quickly is integrate much of the writing I have done for other blogs and publications into this blog so that I can have everything together in one place. I expect that this will be something of a hodge-podge of content on various topics from a range of sources, but I have decided it is time to try to pull as much of it together in one place as I can.

Lately, I have been learning to use a lot of new web tools, so I am going to try to integrate some of those into this site as well as use this site to experiment with these tools. One of the things I was looking for was an easy way to track my triathlon and cycling results, so I think I have found a really elegant solution for that which I have started to incorporate into the races page.

Finally, I am looking to do is publish some of the Gerlach family history and old photographs.

So, this is all a work in progress, but I hope to continue to add content and features to make this site more useful to myself and – I hope – for friends and family as well.

St. Hilary was able to put its second streak of back-to-back wins for the season together with a solid 18-10 victory over St. Josaphat. This was another big game for Gaby who scored 12 of the Cardinal’s 18 points.

The win improves St. Hilary to 6-7 on the year. Thing are looking up.