Bike / Stuff/ People Mover

So not long ago I posted about the fact that we as a team need a bus. Like a Thomas school bus. I did not get any responses unfortunately so I will try again however with a slightly different request along the same lines. Really as the team goes it would be incredible if we could get a truck with a full set of back seats so 6 people total could pile in and we could load the bed with bikes and gear. I would love to be able to limit the number of cars that have to make the trips all over the state and hopefully beyond so we do not have to ask so much of the parents.
So the request an affordable really donated four door truck that works real good. Remember we are full fledged 501c3 non profit and it is completely tax deductible. So anybody, anybody..............I mean I know my van is like the greatest ever but we need one more.

El Grupo Events 2009

September-- GABA Blue Loop

October-- Epic Rides Tour of the White Mountains

November-- El Tour

December-- Hell Week with camping overnight trip

January-- TBD

Feb-- Epic Rides 24 Hour Race

March-- Hermosillo, MX Track Trip

April-- Spring Break Bike Tour

Tour of the Tucson Mountains

May-- GABA Luna Lake Bike Tour

June, July, August--- TBD

Also a big thank you to everyone who came to the meeting last night. I am super excited about the upcoming year and really look forward to having a great time. Thanks and yes there is still plenty of time to tell more friends to come and join the team. The more the merrier.

This list only includes the "big" team events. This does not include the USCF bike races that we will do, as the 2010 calender has not been made up yet.

However we most certainly will do the TBC, U of A Crit, Colossal Cave race and many others.

Ignacio

Whole Team Meeting

August 26th Wednesday, 6:30pm at the Club House

This meeting is mandatory as mandatory can be. This is for all "old" riders and all new prospective riders. So this is a great time to bring a friend, family member, or neighbor that might be interested in riding with the team. Feel free to bring a snack to share with the rest and please bring your questions, concerns, and comments.

Also please let me know via this blog if you are coming. I want to know if you are and how many of you actually read this thing.

Thanks
Ignacio

Blue Loop Information

So this Labor Day weekend I have been hoping that most the "old" team will ride with GABA on their bicycle adventure called the Blue Loop. I know there are a lot of questions out there and so I want to try and answer most of those.



A bunch of info is here on there (GABAS) web site:

http://bikegaba.org/index.php?option=com_events&task=view_detail&agid=160&year=2009&month=09&day=05&Itemid=34&catids=37



I would like to leave on Friday after school as early as we can, so like by 4:30 5pm on the 4th so September. We will then come home on Monday after the ride and be home by late afternoon ish, just in time to watch the Florida State Game, they play Miami and yes I really want to watch it.



$50 is going to be the total cost for the whole weekend. Food, travel, the whole shebang. Cash is best but a check will also do. $40 is for food and 10 for travel.



I will have a gear list ready for the riders on the 26th during the whole team meeting.



Please ask me questions if you got em. I will be riding all three days, as will Nelson and about 50 other folks. Daniela will be coming with Damiano, and we hope to have the whole "old" team around. Really this is like one of the coolest adventures I can offer and want as many to go as possible.



Ignacio

GABA Worktrade Tuesday night

Hey Guys,
Sorry for not getting this info out sooner however, if you want to ride the Blue Loop coming up it is very important that come and help Tuesday night. We will be helping GABA and Larry Robinson clean out the storage shed that they have so they can get everything ready for the ride. We will be helping from 5-7pm at night. I will be leaving the club house around 4pm to get there on time so if you want to ride with me you are welcome. I will post a map tomorrow about this on the blog so you all know where we are going but it is roughly at Stone and River.
Please call me with questions and I hope to see you all there
Ignacio

THIS JUST IN FROM LARRY
Address is4555 N.1st Ave. On the west side north of the bridge but south of River Road. Try to make it there early or at least on time . The place closes at 7:00pm.

Whole Team Meeting

August 26th Wednesday, 6:30PM at the Club House

This meeting is mandatory as mandatory can be. I am hoping that we can get all parents and riders together to talk about the upcoming year. Please feel free to bring snacks, invite new prospective riders and your questions and ideas. I am hoping for a big crowd. Please RSVP so I know that everyone is on board and can put it on their schedule.
Ignacio

Tuesday Night Bike Ride

WOW!!! This was pretty exciting to read. The Tucson Bike Lawyer or Erik Ryberg as some of us know him is a good friend of mine and really any cyclist in town. Well he keeps a blog on this web site tucsonbikelawyer.com where he is always advocating for cyclists rights and keeping cyclists up to date with humor, style and reason. The reason though that I mention this is that on his blog the other day he was mentioning that the Tuesday night ride this week is going to be a fun special one in which the founders of the ride are going to come out and ride again. So you should go. But this is not the exciting part, the cool part is that one of the comments posted was one about how someone was going to raffle off a bicycle and was going to give the proceeds to El Grupo. Totally exciting. So if you read this and like the team then please go out and ride bikes with all your friends and buy a raffle ticket.

Thanks Coghauler who ever you are!!!


Eriks' Post
Tucson bike lawyer, regrettably, is in Colorado and won’t make the Tuesday Night Bike Ride this week, but you should. The Tuesday Night Community Bike Ride is still going strong after two years and this week many of the founders of the ride will be there to celebrate. I think they are even going to give a speech.
So go say hello! 8 PM at the flagpole at Old Main. Just East of the main gate at University and Park. If you don’t know, the TNCBR is a slow-paced ride through town every Tuesday night. It is attended by hundreds. Come on your coolest bike. Bring a bell. It’s like a cocktail party on bikes, and you should go!
–Erik Ryberg


The comment
Win a bike on Tuesday night at theFounders ride!!! You read it right…Coghauler, in an effort to make theFounders ride a more significantevent, will raffle one of his bikesfrom the closet with the proceedsgoing to El Grupo Youth Cycling.El Grupo, if you don’t know, is agroup of jr. high and high schoolstudents coached by Ignacio RiveraDe Rosales learning the variousaspects of the sport of cycling.And getting some great physicalconditioning in the process withhill climbing, time-trialing, roadracing, mountain biking, velodromingand El Touring and I’m so darn proudof them I could just spit.So…bring $3.00 for a chance to wina bike (or $5.00 for 2 chances) andget these young cyclists some cash tobe able to go to the places they needto go and some equipment they need to doit. The bike will be cool…definitelyTuesday-Night-Community-Bike-Ride worthy.***SPREAD THE WORD***And Thank You for Your Support

Practice Times Changing

Yup since that whole school thing is starting again we can no longer ride in the morning. No problem we will just ride after school. So beginning on Wednesday August 19th practice times will be:

Wednesday 3:30-5:30pm

Friday 4:30- 6pm

Sunday 7am till I say it's over

All practices meet at the clubhouse and end there as well.

I'm Dreaming of......

A Bus. I would absolutely love to have a bus for the team. Like an old or new school bus type of bus. Something that I can pile people, bikes, and gear into and get the whole team around no problem. Transportation seems to be the hardest thing for us at the moment. How many cars does it take to go MTBin with a group of kids? More than I can drive at once. So if there is anybody reading this who knows how to summon a genie or a fairy god mother, well that would be swell.

We could make it so sweet. Have the logo plastered on the side with your name on it if you buy it for us. We could have bike stands attached to the outside of it so we could work on bikes on location. We could have it all set up so bikes slide right in the back and all camping gear had a place. We could have hammocks that lined the inside for cold weather of rainy camping nights. Really it would be like the raddest thing in town and all to help kids have fun with their bikes and to have experiences that they get for a life time. So just let me know!

Ignacio

Hard Work Pays Off

Pablos Pic is first
Kramer is MTBin

Pablo Silva has been riding with El Grupo longer than any current member. He has also been that classic kid who always tries really hard but results or progress do not seem to follow. He has also had an annoying ability to miss practices for extended amounts of time because of this or that. Well this summer has been the first time that he has been able to put weeks of good practices together and by golly it shows. Every Thursday morning we do the same ride, so we can guage ourselves against each other, and push our selves on a known course. It used to be that Pablo would be off the back of the group in less than 2 minutes. Well he is now rutinely making it to the sprint hill and challenging the folks up front. His is transformed rider and I am really happy and proud to see it. It may have taken him 2 years to reach this point but he is here and I hope he takes it even farther.

Also a thanks to Kramer here. Pablo said it was his help and encouragement that have helped him get here this summer.

Well done boys!!!

More Nationals News

Here is an excerpt from an email I got from Nelson.

Hey Guys -
Just a quick update to supplement the news Max has been passing along by phone. The competition here, at all levels, is absolutely incredible. I'd forgotten how nationals brings so many talented riders from all ages/cats from all over the country to put out their best efforts of the year.
One of the very cool things is that Max is right in there with the top riders, even riding without all of the huge technical/financial/coaching support that about 75% of these kids have. All the top junior development teams are here: Fraziers, Major Motion, Hot Tubes, 5280 (the Garmin-Chipotle junior team), Mesa, Team Swift, etc., etc. These teams have RV's, team cars/vans, massive shade tents for warming up and hanging out at the race venue, trained/experienced coaches, multiple bikes per kid, mechanics, boxes and boxes of energy bars/drinks, hotels, etc., etc. The kids from Fraziers even have matching backpacks and sweat hanky's! The 5280 kids had Cervelo tt bikes, the latest aero helmets, full skin suits with ice packs on their backs to keep cool during the tt (Max beat all of them but one). Many of these kids have taken part in USA Cycling junior development camps, and know each other from the camps and big junior races. So there we are with our van and a few wheels, camping out at the local co-housing, swimming in the Deschutes river to stay cool between races, and Max's one trusty Bataglin, and the kid is beating a bunch of these riders with off-the-chart support. We're having a blast, and whether he decides to pursue this nationals stuff again next year or not it's been a great experience.
The crit is early this afternoon, and Max said he's planning to take an early flier to shake off the weaker riders, hopefully getting the top 10 strongest guys to go with him and lap the field so that lapped riders are pulled and the risk of a crash is reduced. With 67 juniors on a tight crit course, avoiding crashes will be key! We'll see what happens, and in any case we'll call when it's all over.
Hopefully I'll be able to hook up with some other junior teacm managers/coaches after the crit and talk a bit. The coaches have been so focussed on their riders' support that I've not really been able to engage any of them yet, and the kids all take off for the hotels after races. We have been hanging out with some of the para-cycling folks, including a blind woman stoker from the co-housing, and that's been very cool. David Swanson is up here on a tandem with a blind stoker from Maryland; those guys killed it yesterday, won the national championship, and will be going to the para-cycling worlds in Italy. Seeing blind, parapalegic, and other "differently" abled cyclists compete gives one a much better sense of what it means to be challenged as a competitor.

Hearing about all the stuff, gizmos, and toys everybody has makes me want one thing. A team bus. Yeah like a school bus that we could use to drive the team around. That's the one thing I dream about having for the team. That we transportation is not an issue and we can go have fun all over the place. I like our bikes, our style, and everything else. I just want it to be easier on everybody to get the team to where it wants to go play.

Ignacio

Another Nationals Update

This is of course about Max and his grand expedition to race the best kids in the whole country at USA cycling nationals in Bend, Oregon. The adventure is over and I have the updates from the other two events he competed in.

First was the Time Trial that was on Friday. It was an out and back course up hill on the way out and back down to the finish. This is maybe Max's strongest event as it runs in the family DNA of the Cronyns. Max again was the kid on a steel bike, with clip on aero bars, not on a TT bike, loose ball bottom bracket, quill stem, you get the point he rode a bike he could build and well the other kids were riding bikes that cost more than 3 times my car. This is the style of our team and I am ok with it. We can fix anything on our bike and put them together ourselves out of recycled bike parts that the racers of our great city of Tucson are kind enough to donate to us and that's our style.

So the race well not much to tell other than he got 7th over all and was only 15 seconds out of first place. So close and do you think if he had all the tech and gizmos he could have gotten on the podium, well I am going to think so.

WELL DONE YOUNG MAN!

Next Race: The Crit

It took place in down town Bend on a 1 km circuit with only left turns. Max was smart and realized that the same young man had won both the road race and the tt and being very impressed with his strength decided to get right behind him for the start of the crit. Smart move. However as the race started the very strong young man had trouble getting his cleat in and right at the gun 10 kids attacked and opened a gap. Max tried to stay on the wheel of the strong kid however he was boxed in at the moment he made his move to catch the leaders. So max was again on his own chasing the leaders and leaving everyone in his wake. He rode like this until he had passed everyone he could but eventually even the strongest man can't go it alone and Max was lapped by the winner. He exited the course and recieved 20th place. An incredibly respectable finishing position.

I, we, the whole team parents and all riders are very proud of you Max. You raced the best and have come home stronger, more knowledgable, as our true Champ. Well done!!!