Erica shows off her muscle

Being embedded with a cycling team allowed me to gather interesting information, snap photos and draft some of the fastest women in the business. But I also had the opportunity to seek advice and find inspiration for my own racing season, which starts this Sunday at the University Oaks Criterium in San Antonio.

By Friday afternoon, I felt comfortable enough to ask some of my most burning (and obvious) questions. With my first road race only one week away, what advice could the pros give me? Erica Allar, who was sitting next to me on a couch at Specialized headquarters at the time, enthusiastically shared some of her favorite tactics:

1. Don’t listen to the guys. If they yell at you, yell back.
2. Take your turns on the inside. If there is a crash, it will go toward the outside and you will be more likely to avoid it.
3. Try to keep your handlebars in front of the person next to you. They will unintentionally grant you the right of way.
4. Stay in front and go hard. The first five and last five laps are the hardest. If you can hang on for those, you will survive.
5. Men don’t like it when you pass them and will want to chase you down.

I then made the classic rookie journalist blunder and asked Erica, who I knew to be a track star, a stupid question: “Do you love racing crits?”

“I was the U23 national criterium champion in 2006 and 2007,” she said. “But don’t worry. You’ll have fun.”

Open mouth; insert foot; go back home and do more homework.

When she raced for BMW Bianchi, Erica was the U25-women winner and best young rider of the 2009 USA Crits Series & Finals. I think I can trust her advice.

Erica shows off her “holla hands”

Follow my three-day stay at training camp with Team Vera Bradley Foundation HERE.

Saturday was the real reason I ended up at pre-season camp with the Vera Bradley Foundation cycling team. On that day, a $200 donation to the foundation would buy a ride with the team. CycleTo was allowed to give away a free slot, and somehow I managed to win the drawing.

On my way to California, a woman stopped me in the Denver airport to ask if I raced for a pro team. It must have been because my helmet was strapped to my backpack, or perhaps it’s because that area of the country has a disproportionate number of extraordinary athletes. I laughed and told her I was just going to play one for a day.

That day dawned hazy and cool. I could just barely make out the ocean beyond the rise of neon-green fruit farms spread over rolling hills. I suited up in shorts, leg warmers, sleeveless base layer, short-sleeve jersey, wind vest and arm warmers, which I forgot are too big to stay up on their own. At the team house, Alison Powers overheard me quietly cursing them and bounded down two flights of stairs in her bike shoes to retrieve a pair of safety pins. She then showed me the “PRO” way (her words) to secure the arm warmers.

Our group of 14 rolled out into the ocean breeze at 9:30. I felt fresh and elated, more so than I expected. I didn’t think I’d be that giddy fan, but when it came time to saddle up next to a large group of people whom I had grown to admire immensely, and when I suddenly found myself cruising in a peloton of a fully-kitted-out team preparing to race the likes of Redlands, the Gila and various national championships, I felt a rush of excitement.

To my immense relief, I had joined the team on a recovery ride. The women were more talkative on the bike than off, and I asked Erica Allar about the discrepancy. She hypothesized that when they are cycling, they are focusing only on cycling and, in a way, are more free. But when they are off the bike, life comes rushing back. On top of dealing with jobs, family and personal care, they are also trying to find a bit of quiet time.

My lead-out train

The only photo of me riding with the bunch

We wound our way through a few small towns and up a twisting, gradual incline into woods dense with vegetation and freakishly-tall trees. Glued happily to the wheel in front of me, I never noticed we had been climbing until we turned around and roared back down. I love the blinding speed of winding, fast descents, but never get to experience them in south Texas. I was a bit nervous flying around the diving corners with other riders so close to my bike – other riders who needed to stay in one piece more than I did.

“I’m sure they were keeping a very close eye on you,” my dad said when I recounted the story.

The second half of the ride turned hilly in parts. The first long climb snaked up a hill on smooth asphalt. Someone was calling out the percent grade as we rode. I actually enjoyed the slow, deliberate, beautiful climb and felt a sense of liberation not knowing my speed, how far we had left or even what time it was. I arrived at the top without wanting to stop, soft pedal or die (progress). The Amira itself was a joy to climb; the bike is smooth like butter but has an acceleration that reminds you it would like to shoot away when you stand to pedal. Oh, and it had a compact crank instead of just a double. Thank the good and gracious gods of cycling!

Rest stop in the woods

We were out for five hours, some of the fastest, most enjoyable five hours of my life on the bike. My guess is we rode for at least four, our longest stop being at Starbucks. Out of 14 people, probably 10 had an iPhone but only one had an emergency wad of cash. We stretched the 20 bucks to caffeinate everyone and dined on donated boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

There came a point in the last half-hour of the ride when turning right would take us back to the team house on a flat, quick route and turning left would require a bit more time and a lot more climbing. Team director Lisa Hunt took her friend right and I followed the team left, hoping I wouldn’t regret my decision. I was determined to do the full ride as intended, to give myself an extra tiny shred of street cred, to take advantage of the good training or just to avoid regretting it later. Whichever it was, I tensed a bit when they picked up the pace, motivated by home and hunger, but was fine as long as I held a wheel. I decided that getting dropped on a climb would be less embarrassing than avoiding the climb altogether.

My legs started to feel blown on the final ascents. I am not at all a climber and was grateful for the shouts of genuine encouragement and occasional push on the back from Carrie Cash and Israeli national road champion, Leah Goldstein. While I felt extreme gratitude for their help, I was not at all surprised that they cared. After three days, I came to see that this bunch of world-class cyclists are just as easily classified as world-class nice people.

Me and Lauren Hall, a first-year pro

Mad rush on Starbucks

Me and Carrie – the one who got me up the final climbs

Typical…

Easy rollin’

Lone rider hammering

Post-ride trip to Whole Foods for Kombucha. L to R: Alison T., me, Lauren, Alison P., Carrie, Erica

Some of us wandered around the beach before dinner at the team house

Fruit fields between my hotel and the team house

Team Vera Bradley Foundation's Specialized Amira at Specialized headquarters. $10,000 worth of hella fast.

Friday – - I awoke late feeling like a human being again, having slept off the hangover of a day that got me from Texas to California. I trundled downstairs with notebook, recorder and cameras in tow, only to find that my breakfast choices at the Red Roof Inn were white toast, wheat toast, Fruit Loops or Corn Flakes. I skipped the sludge they tried to pass for coffee and typed “Starbucks” into the GPS. I then hit the grocery store for bananas and peanut butter chewy bars. If I was going to survive Saturday’s ride, I was going to need protein.

I arrived at the team house at 10 a.m., just in time to see the ladies riding away to Specialized headquarters, located about a 40-minute drive north in Morgan Hill. The team participated in the Specialized lunch ride, which is a “world championship” hammerfest on Fridays. (I gracefully declined. I would have lasted all of 10 minutes.) Turnout was huge, which was perhaps why a cop showed up a few hours later asking to see a manager and wanting to talk about road safety. A fit specialist sitting with us rolled his eyes and said that has happened before. Despite bringing in business to the small town, the drivers and the cyclists don’t always get along.

Unfortunately, the tour of Specialized HQ we thought we were getting somehow fell through the cracks, and most of the women wanted to ride back anyway. I did get to wander around the employee break area and meet Donny Perry, a “Specialized Bicycle Components University” trainer with an interesting collection of cycling-related tattoos. His office was also one most of us dream of – surrounded by bikes and gear. There were bikes leaned against desks, bikes in the hallways and bikes on the walls. One just outside his office area had a little sticker on the back: “T. Boonen.”

I was also allowed to borrow an Amira from a giant garage full of demo bikes. I couldn’t believe it when they said I could have one. I assumed a free loaner – especially one going out for several days – would be a 10-year old aluminum bike, but I was instead handed an $8,000 piece of carbon strung with Dura Ace components, a carbon handlebar and tubeless tires.

“Just make sure someone gets it back by Tuesday.”

Wooooooo hoo!

Sadly, I had to wait. My ride back to the team house was via car, not bike, although some the most enlightening conversations of the day were in transit. I rode to Specialized in the team van with Jessi the communications director, Brian the team mechanic and Molly the soigneur. I asked them how they liked working for a women’s team. Molly and Brian agreed that the women are generally more appreciative.

“Some of my friends who wrench for men’s teams are shocked when I tell them that the girls say ‘thank you’ when I stay up late tuning and cleaning their bikes,” said Brian. “The other mechanics tell me they are up until 2 a.m. working on bikes and their riders still complain.”

Part of the cyclists’ gratitude comes from the fact that they don’t have as much provided for them, explained Molly. Since the men get more funding and more publicity, they get more stuff. They usually stay in hotels and are thus removed from a lot of the daily activities required to run a pro team – they just don’t realize what happens behind the scenes. Soigneurs prepare bottles, do laundry and fix meals for the men, who generally expect those things to be done. On the other hand, the women are often under-supported and under-funded. They stay in host housing where they help cook, clean and get themselves ready for races. There is no behind the scenes for them.

I learned from VBF cyclist Kristin Sanders that many women – like herself – start out racing on their own, meaning they must make all of their travel arrangements, pack their own bikes and provide their own support. It’s a sport that requires the women to be extraordinarily motivated and willing to spend their limited resources on an expensive, often elusive dream. Thanks to highly-supported development teams, male pro cyclists usually don’t have to fend totally for themselves much, if at all. (You can read Kristin’s blog here, the Kristin Kronicles.)

These women are really into what they do. It’s immensely inspiring to sit in a room with some of the top cyclists in the world and to know that they got there while balancing lives, jobs, families and college. It also helps that they’re really down to earth. I often had to step aside and whisper to the communications director, Jessi, asking her which cyclist had won what because they weren’t offering up their phenomenal results in initial conversations.

Not only that, but the ladies can cook. For dinner we had mushroom and chicken risotto-stuffed peppers. The salad was dressed with feta, sun-dried tomatoes, toasted pine nuts and baked chunks of pumpkin squash. The meal was outstanding, the company equally so, and I felt like an unreasonably-spoiled guest. Of course, before we ate, we gave thanks to the cycling gods, and I prayed silently for survival on Saturday’s team ride.

Team Amiras at the entrance of the place where they were conceived

Alison, Canadian road champion. She’s quiet, friendly and deadly

The lunch ride departs Specialized

Employee bikes in the Specialized garage

Racks of demo bikes in the Specialized garage. Cross on the top shelf, road on the second shelf and mountain bikes on the bottom.

Mini-museum inside Specialized HQ

Canada parks her Amira next to Alison Power’s Tarmac on the “Bummer” – a bike rack for guests. At 5′10″, Alison Powers is too tall to ride an Amira.

]]> http://www.mellowveloblog.com/?feed=rss2&p=135 5 http://www.mellowveloblog.com/?p=119 http://www.mellowveloblog.com/?p=119#comments Sat, 06 Mar 2010 04:22:36 +0000 KFullerF4 http://www.mellowveloblog.com/?p=119 Meeting Team Vera Bradley Foundation

The lovely women of Team Vera Bradley Foundation with foundation spokesperson and cancer survivor, Heidi (tall one in the center). Team director Lisa Hunt is on the far right.

Thursday — By 7:00 in the evening, I found myself in a van full of professional women cyclists. I was in a daze, rocking back and forth with half a cheek on the bench seat, fighting to stay awake on the fumes of four hours of sleep enjoyed in the distant past. We were an hour and a half into what should have been a 45-minute drive, trying to find a Thai restaurant in San Jose.

“Since you’re affected by the radio ban, should I be writing down that you’re in trouble because you all seem to have no sense of direction?” I asked, trying to make light of the fact that we had just made our third illegal u-turn.

No one laughed. I slumped back into my seat next to Alison Powers, hoping she wouldn’t notice the softness of my wimpy thigh squished against her solid muscle. I noted that although I appear to be roughly the same size, shape and weight as many of the team members, the difference is that when I sit down, my thighs spread out and settle whereas theirs do not. Solid muscle holds its shape much better than under-ridden legs.

We did get to the Blue Mango eventually – well past the point of hunger-induced crankiness – but I was relieved by the kindness and welcome the team extended to me, in spite of the fact that the communications director forgot to tell them I was coming. I can’t imagine what the men’s teams are like, but reason, experience and stereotype lead me to believe that had I been in a car with the male equivalents of the Canadian road champ, the U.S. NRC points champ, a two-time U23 criterium champ, last year’s U.S. time trial champ and a collegiate wonder, they would not have been so down to earth and willing to have a nameless freelance writer, cycling fan and non-racer (at this point) tag along like a barnacle.

We spent the evening sharing food (peanut stuff was popular) and talking with Heidi, a breast cancer survivor and spokeswoman for the Vera Bradley Foundation, the team’s title sponsor. Although other pro teams and pro sports have begun to associate themselves with causes, Team VBF is probably the first cycling team to actively raise money alongside raising awareness and raising hell on the race course. Each individual Team VBF racer has the goal of raising $2,000 for the Vera Bradley Foundation, 100% of which is turned over to the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis for research purposes. (You can learn more and donate here.)

The team’s training camp is based 45 minutes south of San Jose in a beach house just outside Watsonville, a farming town that primarily grows apples, strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and table mushrooms. Since I couldn’t check into the fabulous Red Roof Inn until 3 p.m., I drove aimless loops around downtown and the nearby neighborhoods. There were migrant workers walking everywhere, ducking in and out of tiny cafes where a word of English was neither spoken nor written. Beyond town, the farmland glowed green, ringed by rainbows from the giant industrial sprinklers. I eventually landed at Starbucks, my face buried in an espresso drink. I watched a guy on a yellow bike with one purple wheel and one red wheel doing track stands in front of Target.

Sadly, I don’t remember much else from the first five hours I spent with Team Vera Bradley Foundation. We arrived back at the house around 10:30 to see Brian the mechanic out in the cold washing wheels. I myself returned to my hotel and a warm bed as fast as the Chevy Cobalt rental car could go (which is not very fast).

Those Rolf wheels need to stay clean

Divine providence? Perhaps. As a rookie freelancer on the cycling news scene, trying to balance my passion and my real job, this is a huge chance for me to rub elbows, write stories, shoot video and take pictures. So even though I started the year with only three days of vacation, I took two. Four-hundred dollars worth of plane tickets, a new bike bag, a really cheap hotel and a bitch of a time renting a car (I’m under 25) later, I have a plan for a really exciting weekend.

Right now, I don’t know too much other than I get to join the team for a tour of Specialized headquarters on Friday, March 5 and ride with them the following day. I get to talk to whoever I want (including 2009 U.S. NRC points champion, Alison Powers), tag along in the team car, ride my bike and generally worm my way around amidst a group of kick-ass cycling women.

But like I said, I’m a rookie. My biggest goal is not to make a fool out of myself, so I am requesting suggestions for how to “hang” with a PRO team. Also, what questions would you like me to ask the team members? (If you are a guy, please don’t ask me if I can forward a marriage proposal.)