I’ve spent the last few months making the best of mother nature’s annual butt kicking. I stayed active on the mountain bike and engaged in nightly dates with my trainer and Netflix account. With a relatively light final semester at school, I was fortunate enough to have some time to make a few trips around the country to visit friends and family. I logged some long hours during my trips to Florida, Arizona and even a week long spring break trip to Northern California. I squeezed in a few training races in Florida and Arizona to boot.

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Spring Break in SoCal has become a tradition for the Albers family with the pool, beach, hikes at Torrey Pines, zoo, and LegoLand as our top destinations.

The weather is a little bit off, showers on some days with cooler temps almost every day, but with the sun out, it is hard to complain too much about riding in the North County San Diego area.  Groups rides twice a week have been on the agenda, coupled with a few longer rides – mountainous by Ohio standards – the fitness seems to be coming along at a steady rate.  Riding in this area has been great, familiarity with the wide variety of roads and catching up with the many friends I’ve made during past trips make the time on the bike fly.

I’ve still never made into the ocean, that’s Swami’s break off in the distance, some day I’ll give surfing a go…

The anticipation for the race season is running quite high, all the guys are looking forward to quite the “competitive” year.

My winter has probably not been as exciting as many of the guys on the team, at least not cycling-wise. I have spent most of it in cold, snowy and dark Michigan, which means lots of time spent on the indoor trainer. My approach to dealing with this for the past couple of years has been to substitute volume with intensity: keep the rides short and sweet with very little downtime and hit it hard nearly every day of the week. It works pretty well as long as you aren’t planning on any stage races in early spring. Aside from that I have been dabbling in skate skiing, which I found to be a lot of fun and a good way to get some aerobic exercise outdoors when there’s two feet of snow on the ground.

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My hometown is Terre Haute, IN and I have been in Bloomington for 7 years. My favorite race is Hyde Park Blast, the atmosphere at the race is incredible, and racing under the lights is always a good time. Plus, it is one of the few crits that is difficult enough to scale down the field by the finish.

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I’m currently going to school at Michigan Tech which is in Houghton, MI. For those of you who don’t know where that is, it’s on the Northern tip of the Upper Peninsula. It’s pretty much as far North as you can get in Michigan. Needless to say, the winters up here up here are pretty crazy. If I had ride my trainer all winter I would probably go insane, luckily the XC skiing up here is great. Its a nice break from a long season of cycling, but now that spring is here, I’m definitely getting anxious to start riding.

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Chris Uberti checks in with some of his favorites, photo on Mt Lemmon near Tucson, AZ

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The 2011 race season is fast approaching and the tell tale signs of this is the weather changing , new bikes and clothing arriving at your doorstep, and emails after emails of race registration information clogging up your inbox. This is my first year riding on Panther p/b Competitive Cyclist and I will bring on board a whole new perspective on racing. For one I think I’m the first Canadian to ever be on the team, so that alone says how much talent they were missing and what I will be adding to the team.  And second I’m the only track rider on the team; for now…

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STS stands for Spring Training Series and I really approach these races with that in mind. I rode to the race in Ann Arbor from my parents’ house in Redford… a 2 hour spin. Tail-gunned the B race to get some extra miles/ speed and raced the A’s for real. I felt surprisingly good for my first race of the year and even took the first preme! In hindsight though, I probably raced a little too aggressive in the early part of the race to expect a decent sprint from my legs at the end. I was really playing my cards for a break, which never transpired. I had good position going into the sprint but nothing in the legs and ended up 8th of 50. I console myself with the fact that I had a ride time of 4 hours when I crossed the line… but that’s merely a cheap excuse. Rode back to my parents house for a total of 6 hours and what I imagine was well over a hundo (100 mi). Even got to stay for dinner. Nice.

-Vince Roberge

I have wanted for the last few years to ride an unreasonably long distance to a spring training race, do the race, then bum a ride home. Probably not the smartest idea in the world, but whatever. In past springs, my plans have always been foiled by either bad weather or lack of the aforementioned ride home, but things finally worked themselves out, and today I was able to ride the ~65 miles from East Lansing to the training series at Waterford raceway on the east side of the state. Of course I spent all of 3 minutes planning the route and something like 50% of it turned out to be on dirt roads; luckily they were fairly high quality ones so I did not get any flat tires.  Also, since I am not a member of a pro-tour team, and I also do not have a groupie or personal assistant who is willing to drive behind me when I train, the number of point-to-point rides that I have done is rather limited. As it turns out, riding is a bit harder/slower going when you have a strong headwind the entire time.

Anyway, on to the race.  It’s your standard racetrack course: lots of sweeping corners and a small hill somewhere in the middle. 90 min + 2 laps format and a field of around 50. Larger than I expected given that a competing event was going on in the same state on the same day. There were many breakaway attempts throughout the day, and I tried to join every one that looked promising.  However, the right combination never materialized and the finish was destined to be a sprint.  I was sitting in good position on the last lap when a junior rider from Mesa cycles attacked with two others on his wheel.  In retrospect I should have followed them immediately, but instead I slotted in behind another rider who led the chase. He pulled off just before the last corner and I was left to start my sprint from the front with too large of a gap to close before the finish.  Got passed by a few more people and ended up 7th or 8th I believe.

-Greg Christian