Training Log #1

Hi Everybody, I just wanted to let everyone know that I am traveling for the bike once again. After having been signed with the Nerac Pro Cycling Team (www.teamnerac.com) for the 2007 year, they have put us up in a house in Tucson AZ to train for the months of January, February, and March. Pretty sweet huh? So like a year or two ago, I’ll be trying to write a few emails to keep everyone up to date on how the season is going (you can check out stories from my time in Belgium at www.charlescoaching.com/diaries). **Warning** For you English/grammar stars out there, I apologize in advance for my really informal email context, atrocious spelling, and really disorganized story lines. I’m just trying to keep everyone up to date on how I’m doing… and hopefully entertain sometimes too. Back to the update…To add to this awesome opportunity it turns out that just training in Tucson isn’t enough! I will be joining 3 teammates for the month of march, and we’ll be headed to California to race in the first races of the NRC series (which is pretty much a pro racing circuit that professional teams compete on throughout the season). I'm excited to get out and race on the west coast... Our team's season officially starts in April though, so our goals are to just hit march with a ton of miles in our legs, and let the races whip us into shape... ouch. Either way, it will prove to be a great start to the season. So while I’m here in sunny, and most of the time warm, Tucson, the business in CT is still thriving (hopefully). Between an extremely helpful and enthusiastic junior, Bob German, my brother Foster, and my Dad, the CCNS performance center is still open to all who wish to ride on the computrainers and get in some good riding with good company. So riding is going well. I’ve been logging some good miles, and learning the roads here in AZ. This is definitely the place to be for the cycling professional community… On any given day you can ride on Mt. Lemmon and see a minimum of 5 other pro riders… Navigators, Health Net riders, and even the occasional Discovery guy. It is a 26 MILE CLIMB. It’s crazy. That’s where I’ll be spending A LOT of time this winter. Well that’s it for now. I’ll shoot out an email to everyone every week or two, or maybe more frequently if things start getting exciting here… But I doubt it… It’s just 6 riders in a house, walking around like zombies and trying to recover from one day to the next. If anyone has any questions or would just like to email to stay in touch, please feel free to fire away. I would also like to once again thank everyone who helped my along the way to getting where I am in my cycling career, parents, mentors, and friends… and my clients too. Without all of your support I’ d be nowhere. Talk to you soon!

12/16/2007

Training Log #2

Hello Everybody, I’m just reaching out to everyone to give you all an update as to how everything is going out here in Tucson, AZ. It looks like I’ve been out here for almost 3 weeks now, and the training has been going very well. I’m in the middle of my heaviest week of training before I take a rest week, so the volume is pretty high. To give you guys an idea of the energy that I’m expending… I’ll go through a few days of training this week in terms of how much food I need to eat…. And I am not making this up. Through some testing that I’ve been through to determine my metabolism, and the information gained from my Powertap… This is the amount of calories I need to take in each day to maintain my weight. Monday was a recovery ride… 877 calories worth of recovery and easy spinning, about hour and a half. So adding this on to my regular energy expenditure due to my metabolism, and I only needed to take in 3477 calories… Equal to just under about 2 pounds of pasta… Nooo Problem. Tuesday was a workout day. Now we’re stepping it up a little bit. It was some tempo hill repeats with some endurance, totaling to about 5 hours on the bike, 92 miles, and about 3120 calories of expended energy… not including the rest of my day. So again, my necessary calories intake was about 5700 calories for the day. Not bad… that’s equal to about 1.3 gallons of premium ice cream… Sweet. Wednesday was another workout day. An endurance day. So that meant 6 hours on the bike, about 107 miles, and expending about 3500 calories, for a grand total of about 6100 calories needed for the day. That’s a tasty 12 McDonald’s Big Macs. Sounds good. But what kind of nutritionist would I be if that was what I was eating. In reality I eat basically the same thing every day….Clif Bars on the bike. Oatmeal or Cereal for breakfast. Massive amounts of pasta with chicken or turkey, with vegetables and olive oil for lunch and dinner…. I won’t lie though, sometimes my mental fortitude breaks down and I indulge in a little frozen yogurt at the local Penguins Ice Cream place. So that is an idea of what’s going on around here… a lot of riding and a lot of eating. Other than that I make sure that I try to get a lot of rest and keep up with work. Hopefully everyone is staying warm!

12/16/2007

Training Log #3

Hello Everybody, I have just finished up my recovery week! It was awesome…. Yet torture at the same time. It’s great to not have to do almost 500 miles a week in riding. But as you can all imagine, all that riding took up a lot of time. It was time to catch up with some rest, food intake, and luckily for me, I have clients and work I can catch up on as well. But even with some work to catch up on… What do 6 guys pent up in a house do with themselves during a week with so much downtime? Most of them are purely professional riders, with no other job to keep them busy. Here are some of the things they do… Sitting outside the coffee shop is probably the most popular thing to do. For some reason the cool thing to do is ride 40 minutes to a coffee shop… sit there for an hour or two and people watch… and then ride back. The only problem for me is that I don’t drink coffee. So I sit and hang out with the guys as they drink their Venti Cubano Mochachino Lattes, and just enjoy the company. The second most popular thing to do is to go to the movies… all day. We’re not making a big buck as professional cyclists, so we have to be economical about our entertainment expenses. We’re all masters of the middle-school movie sneak in. Some of the guys think that finding other ways to exercise is an okay alternative to riding while taking their rest week. It’s sad. They’re that addicted to exercise. On the other hand, if you don’t exercise a lot, then you don’t need to eat a lot. But some guys take this a little far. They think starving themselves will be a good way to make progress on their weight goals and to make up for not riding. It’s crazy…. But that’s the mentality of a pro athlete I guess. On another note… I can’t believe it. I have a race coming up in less than two weeks! It’s the first major race of the year in the US, The Valley of the Sun Stage Race. It’s one of the first races that has coverage on www. cyclingnews.com. I’m pretty excited. Most of us are treating the next month and a half of racing as training for when our team race schedule actually starts in April… so I’m planning on having some pretty heavy training heading into and between the races. Next week will be a 28 hour training week, and then I’ll be doing a similar training regime during the next week, which will lead right into the first stage of the race on Friday (16th of Feb.), a 12 mile Time Trial. I’ll use the 3 day stage race to finish out another 25+ hour training week. I’ll train a few more days after that and then begin my next rest week. During the rest week I will be headed out to California with Chris Jones and resting up to begin a full month of back to back NRC Stage races! I added up the total days of racing and it turns out I will be racing 14 days out of the month of march… and our team’s official race calendar doesn’t actually start until April! Crazy. I’m interested to see how my body responds to this level or racing and training. If all goes as planned, I will be headed into April with some awesome fitness and ready for a whole season of solid high level racing. All of my teammates who are multi-year pros say that March in CA is crazy, because that is basically the most important part of the season for the west coast based pro teams. That means they are headed into these races with peak race form… We’ll just have to wait and see how it goes! Aidan

12/16/2007

On the road again.

Hello Everyone, I know it’s been a while since my last update. It’s been a crazy month! We have finished up our month of racing in California, and I am happy to say that it went relatively well. The team had two top 5s, and 4 other top 20s… Pretty good for treating the early heavy hitting NRC’s as racing. After Redlands, and after 3 months of being on the road, we came back to the northeast for a whopping 7 days to get try to get our lives in order, and now we’re back on the road for another month. We are kicking off this trip with the U.S. Open Cycling Championships. It’s our first UCI race of the season, and this means it’s all pro teams or national teams only… but it’s really not that much different than all of the NRC races we were doing all last month… So we should be pretty ready. Check us out on NBC starting at 2pm on Saturday… the race should be nationally televised and, if we ride our bikes right, we should get some air time. From here we will be off to Jacksonville Florida, for an NRC Criterium. Then we have some down time in Athens Georgia for a week or two, before doing 8 days of twilight crit racing for big money… known as the USA Crit Series. So it will be an exciting month for the team, as we all start to feel some real race form come into our legs. A great lesson learned while on the road: Stay Organized! This for me is a personal challenge, but it makes your riding and recovery much easier! Having a system that you can always fall into and rely on is one thing that never changes while on the road… and having some consistency while staying at a different hotel room or house week after week is one of the only things that keeps your stress levels down, and your enjoyment of the trip up! Thanks again to everyone who has been sending emails of support. I look forward to them everyday. Aidan

12/16/2007