Training Tales from Tucson

So, Buck and I are here in Arizona. Pretty sweet weather, in the high 70's all week, has made the riding perfect. After a hard week’s training, sitting at the coffee shop is even better (anyone that's been to Tucson would know why). Being on the west side of Tucson is a great location for riding, it’s only about a 12 minute ride to the U of A to meet up for all the rides, and about 4km to the bottom of Gate’s Pass, a pretty good climb with a short but fun descent.

The grocery store is only a few minutes walk away, but Buck brought an old "townie bike" with fender's and a basket that we take every now and then. So getting around is easy.

When we are not riding we are usually at the university having some coffee,
relaxing at the house, or listening to Buck play the guitar, which he is
pretty good at, or listening to him sing, which he is pretty horrible at (it kind of
reminds me of American Idol), but I can put up with it. My favourite time
waster is the Cycling Manager 4 game, I only have the demo, but it's
addicting.

The great thing about Tucson is that you can do whatever kind of ride you
want. You can ride flat all day, which is called the "Big Square", or you can
climb all day with the longest climb around being Mt. Lemon, at 9000ft and
28 miles which we often like to go ride. If you don't feel like climbing too much, and don't want to ride the flat all day, there's a bunch of other rides that have it all. There are also plenty of bike lanes around town that can get you safely to anywhere you need to go. There's only two downfalls to Tucson, one being the glass in many of the bike lanes (Bucker's on his 4th flat) and the other being the old people with cataract protection sunglasses who are in a hurry to run you off the road so that they can get to the golf club in time for T-off.

Even though all this training in the sweet weather is fun, I can't wait to
finally race with the Jet Fuel boys and hopefully have an awesome season
with some big races under my belt. Over the next few weeks I'll be talking
with Andrew, to come up with a more specific training program and start to
zero in on the race calendar.

We'll keep you posted from the "Valley of the Sun"