FLCC Newsletter - August 2004

 

Jersey Hill Circuit Race

Saturday, August 7, 2004, 10:00 A.M.

 

The 4th Annual Jersey Hill Circuit Race will be held in Danby on Saturday, August 7, 2004. We are trying out the August date in response to; poor spring weather in previous editions, a view that there is a need for a local race in August and an attempt to spread out the racing and volunteer opportunities.  All categories and distances are listed on the club web site. Please come and race or volunteer:  yourself, your spouse, significant others, and friends for one or more of  the various race duties which include registration, setup and sweeping of the course, scoring and timing, pace car driving, food and beverage pickup, etc. The race is the day before "The Great Race" in Auburn.

 

This is a good course for riders wanting to try out racing for the first time. We are offering two races for junior riders ages 10-14 and 15-18.

 

We will be looking for volunteers to help marshal the course, thereby ensuring the safety of participants. Volunteers will receive a free T-shirt or water bottle. If you wish to volunteer, please email Jim Bondra, jbondra@ithaca.edu or call 607-274-1962 (w) or 272-1365 (h) till 10:00 in the evening.

 

Remember: Without club member support, races do not just happen. Thanks to everyone who has volunteered in the past and is thinking about volunteering for this race and others.

 

Jim Bondra

Director-Jersey Hill Circuit Race

 

 

Refueling After Riding

 

Refueling your body after riding, or any other exercise, is as important as properly fueling before exercise. The amount of refueling should be proportional to the calories burned. For short rides and light exercise, refueling is pretty easy to accomplish by eating well during normal meals with nutritious snacks. For long rides and hard exercise, refueling with the right balance of nutrients and optimal timing can improve replenishment of glycogen stores and repair damaged muscles. For the cyclists that ride hard multiple times a week, riding with full glycogen, water, vitamin and mineral stores makes a big difference in training performance, perceived exertion, and enjoyment of the ride. Remember that glycogen is your source of readily available glucose, water is essential for many things, vitamins act as cofactors in the burning of nutrients for energy and other metabolic processes, and minerals help maintain electrolyte balance.

 

Eating within 30 minutes of exercise starts the refueling process. Eating smaller quantities every few hours improves refueling of body stores compared with eating one large meal after exercise. Depending on your body size and level of work a good guideline is 75 to 100 grams of carbs (300 to 600 Kcal) every two hours for up to six hours after exercise. A ratio of 3 parts carbohydrate to 1 part protein provides carbohydrates to restock the glycogen stores and protein to rebuild damaged tissues and stimulate glycogen replacement.

 

Most American diets are sufficiently high in salt for the recreational rider. For more strenuous rides, especially on hot days, the consumption of salty foods (pretzels, crackers, and a little extra table salt) helps to replenish sodium lost in sweat. Don’t forget about replacing potassium and other minerals and vitamins as well. Optimally, a diet high in fruits, vegetables and whole grains should supply your vitamins and minerals. Besides, it’s summer in Ithaca and local fruits and vegetables are at their best B enjoy them regularly!

 

Don’t forget to replenish your fluid level. Water, sports beverages, fruit juice, lemonade, smoothies, whatever. Depending on your choice of beverage you can get carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and protein along with your water.

 

Kerry E. Kaylegian

 

 

One More Kilometer

 

"One more kilometer and we're in the showers" is an apt description of my ride on the ESG TT course Saturday afternoon. Cloudy skies as I drove out of Ithaca. Threat of rain. As I approached Lisle on Rt79 all hell broke loose and heavy rains flooded the road, slowing traffic to a crawl. After crossing the bridge 2 miles further along in Whitney Point, to continue on 79 toward Chenango Forks, the road was dry and the sun was out. It stayed that way to Chenango Valley State Park. I parked off the main road and mounted my bike, riding the first part of the course south, to the entrance to I-88. All was fine until the final 400m, when I was drenched by a sudden downpour. I made the turnaround and rode right back onto dry pavement, continuing north. At the north end of the course I turned around again, imagining the final 2 miles of the TT back to the park. As I turned onto the park entrance road, the skies turned black...I decided to skip that part, and rode back out to the car.  I drove my car into the park entry road and got drenched by heavy downpours! After checking out the start/finish area, I headed on my way. On the way out of the park the roads were dry and the sun was out again.  Talk about "scattered showers"...

I drove down to the Poughkeepsie area for the UnionVale Road Race on Sunday. There was a full contingent of Ithaca riders there and they fared quite well. I know Maria won the Saturday crit and was 2nd in the RR. Danny and Andrew Chadeayne were in the top 10 or so of the Pro 1-2 RR. Eric Laflamme was seen collecting a paycheck from the cat 3 race.

I rode the Masters 40 race. There was one rider (Dmitri, Russian) who is far better than any of the rest of us. He blew the race apart after about 5 miles. Only 3 or 4 riders could go with him on the hill, and I wasn't one of them. I was happy to stay with the field which seemed to be a better match for my fitness level. Apparently Dmitry crushed the guys who had gone with him and they all came back to the pack looking trashed. My decision not to try to make it with the break suddenly looked like a good one, since these guys who are clearly stronger climbers than I suddenly seemed to be pretty ordinary after a few rounds in the ring with Dmitry. With about 8 or 10 miles to go, and many riders showing signs of fatigue from the many climbs, I bridged to a rider who had been popped off the front by his team, figuring that if they blocked for him they would also be blocking for me. He faded on the next hill and I was off alone. I decided to see how far I could go alone, and got a significant gap before 5 strong guys came across to me. (including my teammate) The pack chased hard and got close, but a few key hard pulls by Andy Ruiz and me finally opened the gap for good. My teammate and I threw in a few attacks but it was clear that the group was too strong for any one rider to escape. The final climb is about a mile and a half with a steepness much like Bostwick Rd.  It was going to come down to a VO2 max test. I just sat down and started spinning at whatever pace I could hold. Slowly riders faded away. For the last part there was just one Bethel rider and me, looking at each other and trying to mask the pain we each were feeling. I was in a 25T and he had only a 23. It was obviously a little easier on my legs than his. He stayed glued to my rear wheel. When we reached the top section where the grade eased up I backed it down by a few percent to be sure that if he jumped me I would have something to respond with. We were both in 23's and 21's now. I had no gear advantage. My slowing up allowed my teammate to catch back on. He passed and took a short pull at 500m to go. I slid back behind the Bethel rider. At 200m I jumped hard and as I went by, I saw Bethel sit up. He had nothing left to accelerate! I told Doug, my teammate to jump on, and we both got clear to finish ahead for 2nd and 3rd overall. I was quite pleased to have survived and even prospered in such a tough race.  Dmitry finished at least a minute and a half ahead of us! He's made of different stuff!  Whew.

 

Glenn Swan

 

 

Sodus Point


The round-trip from Willard to Sodus Point would make a great addition to next summer's Sunday ride schedule.  The landscape north of the throughway is more populated and less forested that many of our other Sunday rides, but taking a break on the grounds of the old Sodus Point lighthouse with a view out onto Lake Ontario is an exquisite feature of this ride. And the drumlin topography north of the Thruway is memorable. 

Stuart Wolsh, Alex Specker, Donald Specker and I started from the parking lot at the south end of Sampson State Park at about 9:20am.  If the closings of the Seneca Army Depot and the Willard Mental Hospital had adverse affects on the economy of nearby Willard, it is not reflected in the shininess of the razor wire that envelopes the latest detention facility at Willard.  The virtual absence of visible human beings inside the grounds of these facilities is worrisome, to me at least.  Just outside the grounds, however, we watched--on the way to our start--a bit of the cycling portion of a 400-person triathlon that started in Geneva and consisted of a one-mile swim at the north end of Seneca Lake, a 13-mile run, and a 56-mile bike ride.


During the three miles we covered inside Sampson State Park and for perhaps the next 10-miles of lake front, some sort of algal bloom cum fish die-back seemed to the have recently peaked in the lake and the smell wafting toward us was alternately that of raw sewage and rotting marine biomass.  But--in a testament to the doggedness of human nature--people sunning in deck chairs near the water's edge had adapted! When Geneva came into view, we overlapped briefly with a faster-moving portion of the cyclists in the triathlon.

North of the NY Thruway, traveling under clear sunny skies, we immediately entered drumlin topography which extends all the way up to the shores of Lake Ontario.  My no doubt imperfect understanding is that drumlins are small hills formed by the interaction of a shearing glacial ice and the underlying deformable basal till layer. In contrast to drumlin topography of Wisconsin and Minnesota (for an aerial view, see http://www.geology.wisc.edu/~maher/air/air11.htm), it would appear that our route in Wayne County passed through a more helter skelter array of drumlins with roads and farms winding up hill and down dale.

 
Along the way we saw a few large avifauna, great blue heron and the red-tailed hawk, but no bald eagles, which nest in some areas north of the Thruway. At the village of Lyons, we watched a lock of the Erie Canal operate, dropping a pleasure boat 12.5 feet down to 368 (?) feet above sea level, a level considerably lower than Ithaca's 1099 feet above sea level. We passed through a fair in the city center that included an array of vintage cars and Polish-Ukrainian sausage on sale. Two men dressed in 1900s garb and driving an open-air "horseless carriage" from the direction of Ithaca had passed us near the north end of Seneca Lake and on our return they passed us again, going toward Ithaca, at almost the very same spot. I began to suspect that we were under-dressed bit players on a stage replete with caricature from a by-gone age.

 
We arrived at Sodus Point after about three hours of riding and ate a picnic lunch in a pergola on the grounds of the old stone lighthouse that overlooks the lake from the highest point along the shore, itself probably a drumlin. The Finger Lakes Philharmonic was setting up on a shady patch of lawn to play to a gathering crowd at 2pm, but being busy cyclists and our subs wolfed down, we did not tarry for the performance. A historic marker nearby informed us that on June 19, 1813, a battle took place at the brow of the hill between British and American forces. The author of the marker's text did not say who won, but noted that "The next day the British sacked and burned the village." Unlike the ride around Cayuga Lake, we saw no historical record of the no doubt equally unpleasant demise of Native American villages from this area. And, sorry, I forgot to check whether the present lighthouse predates the sacking in 1813.

 
Stuart, who had done this ride four times previously, brought us to Sodus Point via a route west of Route 14 and he led us back via a complicated route east of Route 14.  Either we were getting weary or the route back was more drumlin-infested. "A Mennonite gathering," commented Stuart as we passed a large tree-shaded farmhouse with 15-20 black vehicles parked under the trees.  A group of men wearing what appeared to be cream-colored suits lounged in chairs under the trees. Some boys in their mid-teens were gathered around a large ditch-digging machine and younger boys were running around the back of the barn. We saw no sign of girls and women.


Sensing twinges of hyperthermia nipping at our heels, we stopped at the outlet mall just north of the Thruway for more water and simply to relish the air-conditioned splendor of the public restroom. At about 80 miles into the ride with full sun and temps in the 80s, I began to think perhaps this wasn't the best ride to have neglected to bring either my hammer gel or my e-caps.  The tuna sub and iced tea in Sodus Point had been great, but the last 15 miles back were an effort. Back at the start at Sampson State Park, Alex reported 97 miles at an average of 17+ mph, but Stuart's odometer showed 90 miles.  In any case, three of us were dog tired.  Stuart--who rides about 200 miles a week--then set off to ride another 13 miles to his house near Interlaken.


John Dennis

 

 

C52 4th Annual Justin Rothe Memorial Ride Around Canandaigua Lake

 

C52, a 52-mile ride in memory of Justin Rothe, a Finger Lakes native, is an event to raise money and awareness for children with asthma. Proceeds benefit Asthma Education through F.F. Thompson Hospital.

 

BIKE TOUR: A challenging 52-mile ride around Canandaigua Lake.

                       Refreshments provided at 3 vistas along the route.

                       Sweeper trucks provided.

 

DATE:    Saturday, September 18, 2004

 

TIME:     Registration starts at 7:30am

    Ride begins at 8:30am

 

PLACE:  Thompson Health

                North Parking Lot

                West Street, Canandaigua

 

COST:     $35.00 registration fee

(If more than $50.00 is raised through sponsorships, then registration fee is        waived)

 

POST RIDE PARTY: 3:00 – 6:00pm

                        Lumberyard Grille

                                    106 Bemis Street, Canandaigua, NY

 

                                    Party admission is free to C52 riders.

                                    $10 donation from others is appreciated.

 

 

REGISTRATION INFORMATION: 585-554-4046 or KellyRothe@aol.com

 

 

The Ride for Missing Children

 

Friday, October 1, The Ride for Missing Children, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children - NY PO Box 1133, Auburn, NY 13021

 

http://www.brownlie.com/temp/kurt/regform2004.htm

 

kurt@brownlie.com, ph: 315-730-9296 Dist: 105 miles, Start: 6:30 AM Emerson Park, Auburn NY; Pre-Reg. Date: August 15, Notes: Fully Supported, SAG and fun!

 

Other cycling events in New York State can be found at: http://www.nybc.net/clubs/calendar/