Steve Tilford

Jeremy Powers is giving up racing on the road and concentrating fully on cyclocross according to this article at Cyclingnews. That is a little surprising, but I guess he felt too much pressure to have big presence on his road team. I loved the quote above. I totally get it. I tend to ride better when it is colder out nowadays and the way that professional road racing has “evolved”, sometimes racing road races is like watching paint dry.

So, now here in the US, we have 3 professional cyclocross racers, which Tim Johnson and Jonathan Page being the other two. Actually, let’s not forget Katie Compton. That would make four. There are a few other guys that could nearly be “classified” in that group, but the amount of money exchanging hands isn’t enough to get there.

Jeremy says he’d like to have a bigger presence in World Cup cyclocross racing. I don’t know if he’s going to be happy with the results. Unless he is going to just uproot and move over to Europe, there is going to be an enormous amount of travel involved with that. He says he wants to restrict his race starts and travel, and he might be able to do that, but if he is going to do a full World Cup season, either he lives in Europe or travels a ton back and forth.

The Belgians have a huge advantage when it comes to scheduling and travel. Just look at the remaining races this season over the holidays. There is a World Cup on December 22 in Namur Belgium and then another one the day after Christmas on the 26th in Heusden-Zolder Belgium. So unless you are Belgian, every other rider in the race is going to have to spend Christmas Day away from home. That is just wrong. Obviously it is a Belgian sport for the most part.

I’ve always thought that the road gives you a good base for racing cyclocross. From my experience, if I want to be going great a cyclocross, I agree with Jeremy and would restrict the number of cross racers, but would look for some cyclo-cross season road racing to keep the form during the cross season when the weather seems to make it hard to stay consistent. A few years ago, I did the Tour of Southland in November, a 5 day stage race in New Zealand, and I kept that form for the next 4 weeks at least.

Anyway, I wish Jeremy the best. The guy has an enormous amount of energy (click here to watch a few of his fellow pros impersonate him), I have to give him that. I’m not so sure about his self perception of a “low attention span”. When he puts his mind to things, it seems to work out pretty great for him.

Seems strange he won’t be donning the Jelly Belly colors for now on.

On Tuesday I thought I was heading down to Dallas for a quick in and out trip. But that changed up big time yesterday when it started spitting ice and drizzle early. And it went from bad to worse. Now the whole area is covered with a half inch of ice and the power is out. And they have no infrastructure here to deal with winter weather.

The whole area is pretty much shut down. I haven’t seen a plow yet. I don’t think they have many. I went by a auto parts store yesterday to get some anti-gel stuff for the diesel and there was a sign on the door that said they had no ice scrapers or de-icer. At Home Depot, there were selling four Dura Flame logs for $25. I saw a guy by four boxes. I asked him if he thought that would hold up for a day and he said he didn’t know or really care. He just wanted to appease his wife.

The woman, Melissa that helps Sue’s mom out, doesn’t have any heat in her car, no defrost, because her heater core was leaking. She was trying to remove the ice from her windshield with a plastic cap off a jug. I told her to use the windshield wiper fluid to loosen it up, but they don’t use wiper fluid that goes below zero here. I had a jug of Rain-X fluid that went down to -25. I told her to start trying the wiper fluid after the engine melted the wiper supply hoses. I’m going to hook back up her heater hoses and try some Bars Leak this afternoon to see if that will stop it up and get it functioning again.

On the internet, it shows the electricity going back online at 7am tomorrow. Man, that seems like a long time, but I guess there are a quarter million people with no electricity here.

I’m going to install some grab bars in Sue’s mom’s shower today. I spent a fair amount of time crawling around on my chest in the attic trying to find the location of the studs under the ceramic tile. Man, was I itchy last night. I’m going to be using a cordless drill, so the lack of electricity isn’t an issue.

Okay, that is about it from frosty Dallas.

It took quite a while to get this frozen mass off the front of my van.

I saw lots of these on the short drive to electricity at Starbucks.

Starbucks was pretty iced in too. They don’t really have any rock salt or snow shovels in this city.

This is my buddy Rod Lake’s dog, Camo.

Rod had “an extra” Zip 404 taking up space in his garage. He just moved from Allen down to White Rock Lake. He’s gonna have to start riding more now that the White Rock loop is at his doorstep.

This was Wednesday, nearly 80 degrees, big change.

Steve Tilford

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“I have a high sweat rate, and low attention span” – Jeremy Powers

Iced In – Dallas