UCLA Cycling

Race Report - Anna Dvorak at Collegiate MTB Nationals

2009-10-19T14:22:00.000-07:00

XC:
Thursday morning we start the road trip up to North Star. As we pass by Mammoth, which got dumped on with over 5 ft of powder, I wondered if I?d be shredding through any snow myself the next day. Instead, Friday morning, I find myself pedaling through some viscous mud as I make my way up the first single-track climb which consists of half a dozen switchbacks. Starting the race with a couple thousand feet of climbing at over 7,000 ft, I realized it was going to be a painful battle.

The worst obstacle I had to overcome was, indeed, at the beginning of the race. Although the very beginning of the XC race was quite opposite from what I expected with a non-neutral flat start on pavement through the North Star Resort?s ?village,? once the climbing began I felt like expected, far from acclimated, let alone ?ready,? as we had gotten there late the night before and to the race 30 min?s before the start. However, after gagging up the climb and finally throwing up a couple times. I started feeling fresh again about mid-way through the first climb.

I felt even more invigorated once I started descending the sweet flowie single-track through a forest of pine trees with tight turns, bermed corners, and intermittent rock gardens through out. Although I felt pretty confident riding most of the descent, not riding dirt enough caught up to me towards the bottom, as my calves started to tighten and I did not have enough momentum to ride completely through some of the technical rock/boulder sections towards the bottom that were on flat which some of the girls were flying through. After all, most of my competitors were riding $10,000 bikes, sponsored (ie Luna), attending major not only NORBA nats, but world-class races.

As I came around to my second lap, I was feeling pretty strong on the climbs so I passed some girls and went from being last to somewhere in the middle. I really enjoyed the course, the weather was perfect, sunny blue sky (by the second lap the fog had rolled out and the sun had shed some light on the course, yes, when we started it was still semi-dark). The XC race seemed to have gone by pretty fast and by the end, I was feeling like it seemed shorter (23 miles not enough) than a lot of the NORBA XC races and should have had an additional lap for a total of 4 laps. All in all, it was a super fun course and a very exciting event. I was glad to hear everyone cheering ?go Bruins? as no one really knew any of the other team mascots/what the other schools were. Also, even though I was the only one representing UCLA, it helped having my former Cal teammates up there which were not allowed to race this year, so most of them came as volunteers to work at Nats. They gave me all the support they could.

Short Track
At the start of the whistle, 60 girls pushing pedal to the metal, all at once was quite an experience to say the least. I was towards the front of the pack, but imagined the mayhem that was going on behind. Trying to pass as many girls as possible on the climb, I stayed on the girl?s wheel ahead of me on the tight-cornered single track through the trees that transitioned into a bermed dual but single slalom-type course, which made it impossible to pass. Once you went over the step at the bottom of the descent, which popped you onto a paved bricked pathway with a tight turn that immediately turned back into dirt, it was back to the beginning of the loop. Now, there was no longer a line of girls wheel to wheel, all packed together. By the fourth lap, I was pulled, along with half of the field, now watching the rest of this intense competition. I ended up finishing 30th, same exact place as the XC.

4X
After deciding not to do the 4X, realizing I had no chance and being exhausted, I decided to kill two birds with one stone- work on my down hill skills and my cycling tan lines :-) Hence the last photos in the album.
Hope you enjoy these couple pics. The entire album can be found on FB:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/album.php?aid=10086&id=1837967950

Batch 'o Race Reports F09-1

2009-10-03T20:12:00.000-07:00

SDSU [Collegiate MTB]
XC.D - David Gingrich
Saturday morning promised dry and really hot (like 95�+) racing conditions on an 18-mi course beginning with a 1-mi sandy doubletrack, a tough Tuna-like road climb, and awesome singletrack descents, rollers, and climbs with mx-style bermed corners and granite slickrock sections. My appeals to race XC B's, showing a road A's license, were denied without Hanns' presence and I was forced to register in the D's. The fields were dominated by SDSU, followed by UCSB, then UCLA, and USC, as the northern schools were at Chico. We agreed to start all collegiate and NORBA categories in one mass-start launch, after joking of adding a mass Le Mans start. All fields besides the A's and cat 1's rode the same single lap of an 18-mile course, while the A's/1's added an extra loop. Several A's and a 1 drilled it on "go" and I hung on as we instantly broke away in the likes of a World Cup Cyclocross start complete with the sand. Once on the 9-10% road climb I was in the company of 2 A's and the 1 after we dropped a couple of A's. I was happy to deposit time in the bank as I was on a hardtail and was certain to make heavy withdrawals on the descents to full-suspension riders, hard-core mtn bikers, and local Aztecs on trails I hadn't ridden before. At the top of the climb the A's and 1 went right and I went straight, entering immaculate rolling singletrack just as a 2 paced up to me. After the skilled 2 left me, I was alone during the next hour desperate to make time on any ascents and flats while trying to descend as fast as I dared. After that hour, I stopped at an intersection where a marked singletrack crossed the road I was climbing. I couldn't figure out if I should turn left, right, or continue straight since there were none of the previous arrow signs, so I decided to wait for the next rider rather than take the 0.66 odds of taking the wrong way. The next rider to roll up was a strong SDSU D's rider who was also unable to make the race day upgrade. He knew the way and we rode to the top and I said "see ya at the bottom" as we dropped down a long singletrack descent and his FSR fs rig disappeared immediately. It was a little disconcerting how fast even his dust trails dissipated as I dropped further back. So I thought my victory was gone, as we only had a few short miles on road and flat to the finish. But I was surprised to find this SDSU guy stopped at the turn to the last 2k finishing section of dirt since he wasn't certain of the way to go. I let him lead out and followed him til I needed to launch a sprint, shouting words of encouragement to him as I passed and finished well clear. Finish time, 1:40, ahead of all B's, C's, and D's. The sad closing is that a near majority of riders got lost, missing the course markers, and the official declared the race nullified. 380-mile drive and 1:40 suffering for nothing - not victory nor even upgrade value.

SD.D - Peter Felton
After the failed XC race that morning I was motivated to do well in the Super D. It was my first non-XC race I had ever done, so I wasn't expecting too much. It was kinda intimidating because most of the competitors were on big downhill bikes.
The actual race was really fun. The course was mostly twisty singletrack, and even though it was pretty loose ad rocky at some points it was still fast. I felt like I was in my groove, hitting the berms and water bars. One jump though I hit way too fast and went right off the trail into the bushes. I got right back on and kept going, deciding to not take anymore unnecessary risks. There were a few flat/uphill sections where I passed a couple of the downhillers ahead of me. Then before I knew it I came through the last section and finished.
My first downhill race experience was a really good one, I had a lot of fun and apparently I finished 2nd? Cool. Thanks for taking me down David/Anna. Good to meet all you guys, and hopefully I'll be riding a lot with you.

STXC.D - Andrew Axley
Keegan, Jon and I stayed the night and raced the XC short track on
sunday morning. A fast, relatively flat course turned out to be
Keegan's specialty. Racing both the C's and D's (all of UCLA was
riding D's), Keegan pushed hard and came out number one. I came in
4th, and Jon was a little further back. Not bad for UCLA's first MTB
race of the week.

LA Velodrome Racing Assn. Cup #4 [USCF Track]
Omnium.4/5 - Joseph Patterson
I crashed out of the points race (40 laps, sprints every ten laps), but won the tempo (15 laps, point per lap) the scratch (15 laps, only final lap matters) and the omnium. I spent my winnings on Tegaderm to cover up the square foot of skin I lost while sliding around the Siberian pine slip'n'slide. The high price of upgrade points...

UCLA at Interbike

2009-09-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

To our sponsors: it was great to see you at the show.

Andrew Talai takes the Specialized Tarmac SL3 for a spin at the Outdoor Demo.

Best in the business, master craftsman Wheelbuilder.com has teamed up with CycleOps on the new PowerTap Track power meter hub. All of our A's riders and most of our team members race and train on PowerTap wheelsets built by Wheelbuilder.

Andrew and Dave were stoked on the Specialized Shiv, which happened to win the Individual Time Trial World Championships this week.

A number of our riders have been very happy with the V-Ti shades from Smith Optics.

These new Specialized Tarmac models were fantastic on the Outdoor Demo road course.

How to get to Jamba Juice from campus

2009-09-21T16:23:00.000-07:00

Clothing is In Stock

2009-09-01T23:43:00.000-07:00

Order Today!

Pro Alum Bernard van Ulden 4th at USPRO TT

2009-08-30T08:24:00.001-07:00

UCLA Cycling alum Bernard van Ulden fought the clock and took 4th place, 2:52 off the winning time, at the USPRO Time Trial Championships in Greenville. He was 8th last year, 13th in 2007, and 5th in 2006.

Brentwood Grand Prix

2009-08-18T22:47:00.001-07:00

Jose in the Cat 4 race

Hippo going hard in the Cat3 race

Jose chilling at the front of the Cat 4 race

Craig in the 4/5 race

Alex and Dave running the booth

Interested in UCLA Cycling?

2009-07-30T19:56:00.001-07:00

Hello there!

Do you like to ride your bike?
Looking for a fun group of students to ride and train with?
Want to learn more about collegiate bicycle racing?

Join our Google Group and find out more!

- The UCLA Cycling Team

Race Report: SCNCA Elite Track Championships

2009-07-19T21:20:00.000-07:00

The collegiate racing season may be over, but the track season is definitely not! The only hiccup is that most of the events remaining on the calendar are elite nationals qualifiers. This means that the events are slightly competitive. That was true for the racing today and yesterday at the San Diego Velodrome. The rules for these events are such that one must be a category 3 or better to compete in the mass start events. Being a lowly category 4 I could only race the time trial events...and we all know how awesome I am at time trials. Every single event was my first time racing that event.

Saturday: Hot, dry, and windy.
4 km ITT 5:26. Winning time was 5:05 by Danny Finneran of Rock Racing.
1 km ITT 1:13. Winning time was 1:08, lots of times clustered at 1:13-1:14. Definitely my best showing.

Sunday: Hotter, drier, less windy.
1 km Team Sprint: Some guy recruited me for an impromtu team and paid my entry fee right before the start. Awesome!
200 m ITT: Qualifer for the eight spots in the match sprint bracket. I placed ninth by less than 0.1 s.

It's a good thing I came with zero expectations, because I posted zero results! No suprise there, but I was pretty bummed to be excluded from the points race. However, I gained a lot of experience and definitely I learned what I can work on.

Courtney O'Donnell Featured in the Daily Bruin

2009-06-03T15:26:00.001-07:00

Today the Daily Bruin published an article featuring Courtney O'Donnell, one of UCLA Cycling's star athletes. To learn more about Courtney, click on the picture above to be redirected to the Daily Bruin website or pick up a copy of the newspaper on the way to class.

Race Report: Collegiate Fixie Fever

2009-05-30T17:26:00.000-07:00

UCSB stepped up and hosted the first collegiate track race on the west coast down at Encino. I've been training off and on at the Encino velodrome since Janurary. I couldn't miss a chance to knock some heads on the home turf! The event was smaller than most of the WCCC road events, but UCSB and Cal Poly came out in force across all categories. Even Colorado State sent two riders, and their woman held her own in the men's A/B field. Conspiciously absent were the Irvine track stars and the handful UCLA riders who said they would come...you guys missed out on a great day of laid-back racing. The teams had a blast mingling under easyups and trash-talking each other between the events.

Men A/B Omnium: 1st

15 km Points Race: 1st
Perfectly suited for me. Punch, recover, hide. I worked the pack and snagged two 2nds and two 1sts. , then attacked off the front and soloed 1.5 km to take the second to last batch of points.

2km Scratch Race: 2nd
Picked the wrong wheel (the CSU girl) and Nathan from UCSB rode off the front to snag the win.

4km Tempo: 1st
I was getting nervous; Nathan and I were neck and neck in the ominium standings. He attacked off the front on lap two. I followed and we were racing one-on-one until the end. My experience with the Encino track was a huge advantage. When Nathan lead it out, I usually came around him. When I lead it out, I rode up to the blue line, goaded him to attack, and slingshotted down the track to fly by him over the line. Blake Anton rode his P3 carbon and disc off the front to take the last three points and clinch my win.

4-man Chariot: 3rd
This was my first standing start event, ever. I put in a good 250m qualifier time trial but lacked the muscle coming off the start line in the four-man event. I will practice this.

Thank you to Evan Ching for graciously loaning me his track bike for the past few months.

Zach Scott took some great pictures

Calendar Test

2009-05-26T19:01:00.001-07:00

http://www.studentgroups.ucla.edu/cycling/calendar.htm

Nats Road Race

2009-05-12T11:22:00.000-07:00

Div 1 Collegiate Nats Road Race
Fort Collins, Co

Who Raced: Me, Alex, Heiss
Results: 38th, crash, 67th

Alright, so this was collegiate nats--just about the biggest race a cyclist at our level can participate in. People have traveled from all over the country and paid hundreds of dollars to be here (us included). In every field there's at least 10 or so domestic pros to deal with/suffer behind.

Let me set the stage by describing the course. It started out with a gorgeous loop on a ridge road next to a lake. It's rolling with a couple key 2min steep climbs of 8%+ grade, and not a drop of flat for ~20 miles. After that, the course got weird--after some brutal hills you suddenly roll into a valley and proceed to do 4 laps on a 10 mile flat circuit. I'm not sure what they were going for exactly, but to me it felt like they were trying to cram every style of racing save cobbles into a single event--hills, rollers, flat, wind, etc. With 155 starters from 40-something different teams and gusting 30+mph winds on the start line, sh1t was going to hit the fan faster then Alex can say 'yum, krill'.

We headed over to the start about 30 min early, just in time to see Courtney beast another girl in the sprint for 7th. It took a good 45 min for all the girls to finish and we started staging. We all crowd forward and wait for call ups. There's so many people that they do 4 rounds of call-ups, by school, in random order. People were shoving, holding their bikes above their head, and all the fanfare and hype and tension was through the roof. Alex took the first UCLA call and I took the second. I think I was in the 4th row when they started us and it was a full-on sprint off the line.

We had the full road (no yellow line rule), but a headwind right off the bat put us 15-wide across the road. Very few wanted to be 1st wheel, yet EVERYONE wanted to be 3rd wheel, all at 30mph. The inevitable crash happened about 5 min in and took out Alex (had his brake cable pulled out by another handlebar--took 5min to fix) along with about 20 others. I was almost caught up and ended up clipped out in the ditch on the side of the road. But, the equipment was fine (if a little out of true) and I caught back on in a minute or so.

Positioning was difficult but it was all for one purpose--the first hill, 8miles into the race. I knew where it was from pre-riding the day before, and I managed to get to about 30th wheel right before the base. The next two minutes after that were, and I'm not exaggerating, the most painful 2min I've ever had on a bike. The pack, literally blew to smithereens with our good friend Mr Mach driving the front. I get to the top in I think the 3rd group on the road and I'm suffocating. I simply can't breath fast enough and my legs/lungs are exploding. I recover a little on the downhill, but there's work to do--I can see the front of the race still, but I bet they're 30 seconds up the road. The wind is picking up and they're not working together well--a chance! I put my head down and suffer like a dog for a solid 15 min. I'd catch a small group of 2-3 and we'd work together on downhills and then I'd drop them and catch another group on each uphill. By the time I caught mooney and lucas binder, that was good enough to make it all the way back to the front group. I was worried about the second big climb on the course but it turns out everyone else was beaten and bruised too because it was a much more manageable pace. Phew--made the selection!! Unbelievable all-out brutal 45min effort. 85% of the field, gone.

From here, the 25 or so of us left dropped down into the flat circuits and the whole dynamic changed. The course basically selected the 25 best climbers, only a few with teammates, and dropped them into a flat windy circuit. No one wanted to pull so there was just constant attacking. We were doing 12mph or 30mph, alternating every 1-2min. But, like I said, we were all a bunch of skinny (and tired) climbers so no one could really put the oomph into the attack to drive a real separation. For me personally, I was really cracking--it was only 1.5 hours into the race and I was suffering during the accelerations. But I kept hearing Ron's voice in my head "don't be conservative--put yourself in a position to win, not get 10th, who cares about 10th??". So while I couldn't go with everything, I tried my damnedest to get something moving when I was in a position to respond easily. Over and over we attacked each other for almost 90min.

To say the circuit was completely flat is misleading--there's a small, 1min or so 5% hill after the feed zone. By the 3rd lap, that was enough. It's about 2:15h into the race and a small separation leads to a big one, and it just happened to be a good mix of teams that the group behind (that I was in) was mostly satisfied. I realized the danger right away, and made two different attempts to bridge on the last lap when it was still within ~30 seconds. Both times I tried to follow a couple people and we'd work together only to explode about halfway there. At that point my sprint was so wrecked that I couldn't create a separation at all. The group had given up, some with teammates up the road, others just totally spent, like myself. After maybe 20min of tea partying, it was clear the break was gone and it was race-on again for everyone. I made it in one more move with Mooney and we were working together pretty well, but still got caught just as the circuits were done.

Leaving the circuits was about 10 miles of rolling, ending with a hill. Perhaps if I had not been so active on the circuits attempting to make the break or bridge I would have had more energy, but f that--I was in it to win it, and hiding on the circuits just to get 20th at the end would have made me disappointed. As it stood I was dropped pretty quickly by the hills going back, and I rolled in for 38th, but I was completely satisfied. I gave it my all trying to make the race. I had NOTHING left in my legs at the end. And as it turns out, it simply wasn't in my cards to win the race, but I left everything I had out on the course.

Thanks for reading,
-Brian

New Summer Clothing

2009-05-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

The 2009 UCLA Summer Kit is now available! UCLA Cycling clothing is made by Hincapie Sportswear.

IMG00109.jpg

2009-05-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

Court didn't win a podium, but won a $200 helmet!

Court's 2nd-claf

2009-05-09T15:30:00.001-07:00

Courtney is growing a second calf from her crash today. Gross

UCLA Bikes

2009-05-09T13:32:00.000-07:00

After a hard weekend of racing...

Crit was "sketch and Fast"

2009-05-09T12:40:00.001-07:00

Alex came through the final turn at about 20th wheel, but there were beast sprinters that managed to push the hungry seal out in the final sprint.

Alex averaged around 315, normalez to about 330 for 75 minuts.

People from fly over states don't do 130 men crits, say Yeh while venting frustration.

Nick Martinez put up an impressive sprint for UCSB, but came up short by 1/2 wheel.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

IMG00106.jpg

2009-05-09T12:04:00.000-07:00

Alex still alive in the Crit. Its insane! 330W+ just sitting in.

IMG00107.jpg

2009-05-09T11:49:00.001-07:00

Courts second crash of the day. This one didn't take her out of the Nats crit though.

IMG00100.jpg

2009-05-09T11:03:00.000-07:00

Kappus and Alex about to start the Crit. Average speed will be 26+

IMG00099.jpg

2009-05-09T10:13:00.001-07:00

Courtney staying in the front at the Crit. Its starting to heat up now.

Pre-Riding Course

2009-05-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

This is where the carnage happened.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Mens results

2009-05-08T15:29:00.000-07:00

I was with the lead group for the MAJORITY of the race. I consider that success. Even better, the bungee-cord on mach plan kept him in sight until the last 5 miles! (He was not in the lead group, despite how the cameras made it look). I finished 38th. John finished somewhere around 60th. Alex was crashed in the first 5 miles from stupid positioning games in a 130 person pack. He landed on someone and was fine but had a brake cable pulled out. More later...

Whole foods in ft collins

2009-05-08T15:19:00.000-07:00

Rocks