It's halfway through both mountain and track racing season, and things continue to work out as well as I could expect for trying to race two full seasons at the same time! All the details are here but the short version is I'm in 5th place out of 41 people in the XC-3/19-29 category in the Georgia Championship Series, and I continue to slowly move up through the rankings in the Cs at the track each time I race. Maybe I'll be 3rd in GSC by the end of the season and in the top 5 in the Cs?

As an accidental season mid-point, last night I went to a great event put on by Ergon at Sweetwater. I'd planned to enjoy a free beer or two and watch Seth run Goldsprints but Namrita (who organized the event) basically told me I had to participate, so I did, and it was a blast! Goldsprints are 200m time trials on fixed gear bikes on rollers, with software on a laptop figuring out who is quicker. I won my first 2 rounds and got eliminated in the semifinals by the guy that ended up winning the finals in his next round, which was not bad against a bunch of really fast people like Eddie O (won solo FM.24.08), Travis Turner (won the pro category at The Snake this year), and plenty of others. I'm not sure if my place was official 3rd or 4th, but it got me a $20 REI giftcard, a pair of Ergon GR2 Grips, and some very sore leg muscles that have been noticeable all day today! Here's a video of Eddie and Marc Hirsch in round-2:

Ergon Goldsprints from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

This was my first time doing goldsprints, and I think it's something I might need to do again, and perhaps next time I'll wear something other than sandals. The new grips will be going on my new mountain bike when it shows up, and I'll report back how well they work with the rest of things.

Mountain bike racing season slowed down for a bit, my next mtb race is a month away, and track racing has picked up steam. What would have been my first night racing with the Cs got rained out, so my first races with non-beginners ended up being part of the Pro Racing Series at the Dick Lane Velodrome. I showed up Friday afternoon, warmed up, and did the best 200 meter time trial I've ever done to qualify for the sprint tournament. It took me 13.03s and I hit 37.01 mph which was a new top speed for me by several mph, but that only got me 17th of 29 people which meant I wouldn't be doing any match sprints with pros, which was fine with me! I had 3 or 4 races against a lot of very fast people, and managed to stay with the pack every time. It was a lot of fun, and significantly more fun than the beginner racing I'd been doing.

Saturday was "The Kerin" and in hindsight, I really should have raced. Even though it was a very fast crowd, people I did 200m faster than the night before were doing well in races, and I'll definitely be riding in the next pro series event on July 11th. As usual, when not riding, I took a lot of pictures. Here's Dave Worth from Knoxville, TN speeding by:

Dave ended up sleeping on my couch and we went on a road ride Sunday morning after perhaps a few too many beers Saturday night. I also tried out two new video camera things this go around. First, I strapped the camera to the back of the motorcycle used in the Keirin races. It turned out alright, but one of these videos will definitely be enough due to the consistent perspective:

DLV 2009 Pro Racing Series - The Keirin from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

The second new thing was strapping my camera to Greggory and making him try and keep up with the pros in a 20 lap points race. He did an awesome job both keeping up and getting great footage, and it was nice to not have to be the one trying to keep up for once:

DLV 2009 Pro Racing Series - Mens A 20 Lap Scratch from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

With some racing-with-pros experience under my belt, my first Wednesday race with the Cs was a whole lot of fun. The results only tell part of the story, but do show that Tyler Grohovec is a Cat-1 road racer just moving through the Cs and Bs to the As! Ability levels in the Cs were a bit spread out so at times it was tough to work together to break away, and I couldn't quite keep up with Tyler, but the highlight of the evening for me was getting 3rd in the scratch race which got me in to the Wheelrace final. This meant I was in a race with s3 other Cs, 4 Bs, and 4 As: we started at intervals around the track designed to have us all cross the finish line at the same time after 5 laps. My 48x16 gear ended up being a poor choice as I spun out a little bit and (like all the other races) couldn't stick on Tyler and Chris's wheels, but I held my own and Emile Abraham (who won the pro racing event last Saturday) didn't pass me until the last 10 meters of the last lap. Having that kind of competition was great, he commented afterwards that he was going all out and had a hard time catching up, and 5 minutes later I was off into the Cs 20 lap scratch race where I only got 6th. Lots of fun, and I'll definitely keep coming back on Wendesdays as this has the potential to be a lot more fun than CX mountain bike racing. And maybe I'll put a stiffer gear on my track bike before then..

Saturday evening I spent at an Atlanta Thrashers game with Kurt, Seth, and Graham, eating all that I could eat. 1 bucket of popcorn, 1 pretzel, 1 order of nachos, 6 hot dogs, and 4 cokes later I decided to call it quits (eating more than anyone else. hoorah!). Kurt then tried to convince me to go on Emily's Death Ride on Sunday: ~75 miles of mountain biking on fire roads in north GA in the cold, but the food conquered me and I respectfully declined. Instead, I headed down to the velodrome on Sunday to record some video of the beginner's class as they (including my brother, Namrita, and Eddie experienced riding on the track for the first time. ~2 hours of video (and riding) later, here's the end result:

09 Beginners Class at the DLV from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

I tried out a few new camera mounts which turned out pretty awesome, and learned a few things including: mount the camera on the infield side of the frame, and watch out for loose velcro, and iMovie's image stabilization is no good for this sort of footage. It'd be neat if it could stabilize this sort of thing, but the results were very very weird. In the future, I'll try and spend a little more time editing so I can get these biking videos down under 10 minutes. I'll also try and pay better attention to how much riding I'm doing while recording, as my legs had about 50% more than they're used to for a workout at the track.

Here's another bike video post, and I have most of the generes covered now so the rate at which these are produced should slow down a bit. First is an 11 minute video from the third round of the Snake Creek Gap Time Trial Series. You can read more about the series here. I missed the second race due to work travel, and for the third one I didn't improve my time much (just a minute or so) because I started too strongly on Adrian's tail, stopped a few times to tinker with the camera, and got leg cramps 200 feet from the top of the last uphill which was a new experience for me. Here's the video:

2009 Snake Creek Gap Time Trial #3 from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

A few days later I went to the velodrome with Gregory and David to do my first round of training there for the season, and put together a brief teaser video for that:

Track Season 2009 from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

Wednesday night was the first of the season for Aaron's Cycling's Wednesday night ride which was very fast (though I somehow avoided getting dropped), and tonight was FM:Race's first weekly Thursday night ride. It's been a very fast paced week on bikes and I'm beat, so it's a good thing that I'm not riding tomorrow. The training plan probably needs some adjustments, as trying to race both track and mountain bikes this year is going to be quite a mess.

I've been wanting a wide angle lens for a while, so I finally bought one so that I'll have it with me in Europe next week: the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM. Previously, the widest I had was 17mm, and those last 7mm make a huge difference. A friend of mine has this same lens, and after using it in January, I realized that a wide angle lens would make a lot more sense for me to buy than a super-telephoto lens.

My first chance to use this lens was at the second Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed of 2008. You can see all the pictures of the Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed here. Most of them were with the 10-22mm lens, and it should be pretty obvious which ones aren't. The edge distortion isn't too bad, and I really like the effect. I'll probably use this lens more than I initially planned on!

Given the amount of training time I lost at the track due to the broken collarbone, I probably won't be riding in the last FoS of this season, but I plan on keeping up doing ~200 miles a week throughout the year so hopefully next year I'll be taking less pictures and riding around in circles more! I did go mountain biking this morning for the first time since my wreck, and while it was only 1:10 of ride time on a familiar trail, it convinced me that I'm healed enough to start doing more serious mountain biking in places I haven't been. (And by the time I'm back from Europe it'll be 4 months since I broke it which is plenty of time to heal.) Hopefully I'll be able to drag Ben out so we can get back in the habit of mountain biking every weekend and increasing the mileage each time.

Given that I work from home these days, I no longer have a mandatory 12 miles of bike riding every day as part of my commute. I'm trying to still get the miles in, and eventually I'm going to find or make a module for Drupal that makes this easy but for now I'm just going to summarize it on here once a week, So over the last week:

• Night Mountain Biking: 4 miles at an undisclosed location on Monday with Seth
• Mountain Biking: 13 miles at Conyers on Saturday with Ben
• Track: 12 miles at Dick Lane Velodrome with Billy, Austin, and a handful of other people
• Around town: 41 miles

70 miles for a week doesn't seem to bad, and is pretty similar to what I was getting in towards the end of my bike-commuting to campus, but it's not going to win the Tour de France any time soon, or any solo endurance mountain bike racing. I read that Floyd Landis did 600 miles a week for the year prior to his run at the TdF (Regardless of if he doped or not, and I don't think he did, he's fast), and Chris Eatough, a regular 24 hour solo mountain bike race winner, does 50 miles a day on a road bike according to him in the movie 24 Solo.

One of my rides this week was to Decatur to try out a friend's roommate's rollers and trainer, and I'm thinking about picking up a trainer for days when it's pouring rain outside so that I can keep the mileage up (Ben just got one last weekend and I'm interested in hearing what he has to say about it). Expect a full ride log and some GPS traces of the interesting ones sometime in the next few weeks, as well as a way to keep all this from taking up the front page! For now though, I need to figure out where I'm night mountain biking tonight...

I spent this weekend doing something I've wanted to do for a while but never gotten around to: riding a real track bike on a real bike track. Mike from Faster Mustache organized a group to take a special weekend track certification class at the Dick Lane Velodrome in East Point. Usually you have to commit to going to 4 or 5 classes in a month on weeknights, but because we had 12 people they did a special class for us on the weekend. I had a lot of experience on a fixed gear bike (I've been commuting on one for over six months) but for some people, in 2 days the went from their first ride on a fixed gear bike Saturday afternoon to mock sprint races on Sunday morning. We all had a lot of fun, most of us participated in a tater tot eating contest Saturday night in between the classes, and no-one fell once on the track (It's banked at 34 degrees on the turns). My only damage is a little bit of sun, and one guy broke a spoke on the ride back home from the track on Saturday.

Riding on the track is a whole lot of fun. There are no cars or potholes or traffic lights or rocks, and you can go crazy fast. After the first lap or two, the banking on the turns isn't scary and by the end of the first day I had a pretty good feel of how to use the banking as an advantage when riding with other people. The first mass start mock race with everyone on the track, I followed someone most of the time and broke away at the last minute and came in second because the guy I was drafting behind did all of the work for 4.5 laps and I only had to fight the wind for half a lap. In the second mock race, a 4 person match sprint for two laps, we took the first lap pretty slow and on the 4th turn I cut in from the top of the banking to the inside edge of the track and went all out. You can see that sequence of events starting with this picture. (I'm in the #3 slot at the start) You can dig around there for the rest of the pictures from the weekend and there will be more to come as I go to more track events.