Everyone has been asking, "where the hell is Sheff?". I'm all up in your grill, son! Things have been crackin large out here in CA all spring. The weather has been great, featuring 60-70 degree temps since January with little rain. In fact, the weather has been so good that all the racers are absolutely flying right now.



I had a little surgery back in early April and had to take a few weeks off the bike. It's pretty tuff making a comeback right into the heart of the early race season. I made my comeback effort at the Wente Vineyards RR and made it to the last lap with the front group before getting popped in the wind. Mr. Powertap showed multiple 10 minute efforts over 360 watts, so I was satisfied.



I moved yet again a few weeks ago. The place in Mountain View was kind of a dump, and I have a rep to keep up, so an upgrade was much needed. I took a page from Christof's book and found a great cottage to take on. While this was technically my 4th move in 14 months, it's in a great neighborhood in Los Altos and very close to all the best riding. I am here to stay! Just last week I hosted a super fun housewarming BBQ at the new pad with Form Fitness teammates, Loral coworkers and other bay area friends.



Pops Sheffield came to visit last weekend, which was great. We played golf, ate good food, and spent some great bonding time on BART, missing the A's game by a scant 3 hours.



Work is stepping up a few notches recently. I was named the Attitude Control Systems (ACS) engineer for a new communications satellite that Loral is building, Nimiq 5. Nimiq will provide satellite TV broadcasts to Canada. I must say that my attitude toward Attitude Control Systems is in excellent control. It's a cool gig, lots of interdisciplinary work and early design studies. I get to yell at people and tell them where to shove their ProE drawings. Yay!

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Sheff loves social networks. Especially because all of his friends are as hot as he is.

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I apologize to my loyal fanbase (both of you) for the recent lackluster blogging efforts. So much has been crack-a-lackin lately, yet there is so little time to document it all. As I am currently bedridden with a bad case of The Ebola, what better time to catch up? Let the info dump begin!
got Plague?

1) Went to snowboard in Tahoe a month ago. It snowed 22" in one day while I was there and the result was INSANE powder greatness. Every run was off the trails, into the trees and totally untracked. At one point, I fell into a creek and couldn't be bothered.

From the top of Kirkwood's backside, before snow dump

2) Racing has started up here in California. I have only raced once so far, but the weekend calendar for the next many months is chock full-o-nuts with Cat 3 excitement. I raced the final Earlybird Crit of the season on Superbowl Sunday. The race is a Pro-1-2-3 event, and it happened to be 70 degrees that day, so the field was close to 100 of the hottest players in the local game, including at least 10 NRC professionals. The pace was very high throughout the hour (for Feb), with an avg speed of 27.8 mph.

3) Work is going very well, in that I have not been fired yet. So well, that although I have been saddled with lots of responsibilities that exceed my pay grade, I still get out a few times a week for lunchtime rides. I still harken back to my days in the grad school lab at UVA, when my angry advisor constantly berated me for attempting to follow an athletic pursuit when I should have been eating, sleeping and breathing my work. Who would have thought that life on the outside was actually easier and 9000% more profitable?

Terrestar-1 with the very cool unfurlable antenna, just like mom used to make

4) The Tour of California has begun! I went to SF on Sunday to watch the prologue, and it was great. Hanging out in the pits during the trainer warmups for all the Protour big-dads was crazy cool. I grabbed some great pics.

Teeny Bettini! I have never heard a trainer make so much noise before

CSC's Vandevelde, Julich and Haedo

Big Thor, rolling some Oakley Thump glasses
Levi rolling up Lombard Street, 11% grade

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The Cat 3 Corner would like to congratulate the Boston authorities for making complete asses out of themselves on 1/31, all over one of our favorite cartoons of all time, ATHF. If said authorities had been reading the Cat 3 Corner last May, they would have seen the exact cartoon depicted in the suspect Light Brights (that had been in place for 2-3 weeks prior to full SWAT team mobilization).



Go out and ride your bike today. Breathe that fresh air, lose the fear - and remember that the world is not as terrifying as many would like you to believe.

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....

Form Fitness is rocking out custom painted Ridley frames for the 2007 season! They came in during the holidays so I was very eager to prep my new Excalibur after returning from a fun trip home to VA for the holidays. I couldn't wait to stop riding the corruption-mobile (Trek 5900). Ridleys are hand made in Belgium and happen to be the shiznittlebamboom. My new machine is outfitted with a brand spankin new SRAM Force drivetrain, FSA wheels and Ritchey components.

Treating the new frameset to a romantic dinner (note 2 Buck Chuck)

I went out for a ride on Saturday with the new steed. It rides like a teflon-coated laser beam! I really like the new SRAM grouppo, it's super clean and shifts with incredible precision. At the end of the ride I stopped by to see Matt at VeloTech for a professional fitting session.

Sunday I went out for a longer training ride with my good friend, iPod Nano. Following 3+ hrs of rolling hills and tempo work, I was taking the usual homeward bound route down Castro Street in downtown Mountain View. Everything was A-OK until a lovely Prius decided to pull an illegal U-turn from the right side of the street, just as I was riding past.
It's what's for dinner.

I yelled some expletives but it was too late. I hit the driver side door pretty hard and cleaned off the sideview mirror before hitting the deck in the oncoming lane. Luckily no one was there to run me over. People poured out of local restaurants and shops to gawk, stare and see if I was OK. I wasn't hurt badly, thanks to a body roll straight out of The A-Team.


My new carbon handlebar was snapped in half, and the front FSA wheel was smashed. Other than that and a few scratches, the bike seems OK at this point. A full check up is pending.


After a police report and many apologies from the driver, I was taken home, where I celebrated New Years eve with an ice pack and much drinking while dressed like an idiot.

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Everyone has been asking what Sheff is into lately. Aside from a visit by 2SkinnyPros Ian and Christoph over the past weekend out here in California, of which I have no pictures yet, things have been all over the place.


Riding with the Form Fitness Fizzlers. We have recently added a women's team (featuring Ashley, Ali, and Colleen) and two more male racers (John and Santiago). I remain the lone hermaphrodite.


Keeping it real equestrian style. My friend Leticia rides on the Stanford equestrian team and recently took me to the stables for a poo-shoveling field trip. This is Squish, he digs Cheez-Its and Razr phones.


Tracking down MF strugglers on Foothill Blvd. I stumbled on this gem last weekend. Note the behind-the-seat bottle cage, ill fitting clothes, TT bars (shadow), and the icing on the cake: huge ass saddle bag velcroed between the bottle cage and the brake calipers. Brilliant!


Went to see my college buddy's band, The Old Fashioned Way, at The Makeout Room in SF. Holy crap they were good! Chris is upper right on guitar.

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The best part about the offseason is that the season is, in fact, off. That leaves all kinds of would-be training time to enjoy the finer things in life, be it a round of golf, a trip to the hill for some pow sessions, or just relaxing with some records.

Relaxation was not the name of the game last week for me. I took a day off work and shot up to Thunderhill Raceway for a day of track driving in the Subaru. My friend from Loral, Bill, is a professional driving instructor and harassed me into going along for the day. I was eager to test out the WRX with the fairly minor mods I had made over the past months. It was the real deal, with helmets, taped headlights, and removal of everything not bolted down inside the car (even the spare tire!).

The track was awesome. Super technical, with 15 turns and lots of elevation change in a little over 2 miles. There were 3 'run groups' for the day, all based on the skill and experience level of the drivers. I was relegated to Group C since I am a noob. Bill is an A Group driver and his group contained a brand new Ferrari, Viper, heavily modded Evos, NSX's, and some Miatas that were not street legal. In fact, about half the drivers brought their cars on or in trailers. Big ballers.
After a few sessions, things really started to click. The car was drifting hard in every corner, but I figured out how to control it and it was FUN. In no time I was smoking much sportier and pricier cars...in a wagon yo! Riding in the passenger seat with Bill during the A Group runs was the most terrifying thing I have ever done. Going sideways at 90+ mph while passing slower cars had me clawing my fingernails into the door handle.

During the last C Group run of the day, I was smoking my fastest laps of the day. I was mastering heel-toe driving, where you operate the brake and throttle with the same foot while speed-downshifting. Coming off a triple pass on the start/finish straightaway, I found myself flying into Turn 1 at about 100mph. Turn 1 is a left handed sweeper with no banking. I braked coming in, kissed the apex at about 80mph, and accelerated out. The car was drifting really hard here, and fearing long walk/short plank situations, I lifted the throttle just a tad.


Aaa-whoops! The car was already on the limit, and I would have made it (according to copilot Bill) without intervention. Upsetting the balance of a car on the limit, much like a bicycle on a twisty descent or a hard crit corner, is fatal. In this case, just letting up a bit was enough to get the rear end loose. I tried to save it, and thought I had, but in the end we pulled two full 360 degree spins down the track at 70+ and went off into the dirt...sideways. The video that follows is not me, but is identical to what I did:



I was pretty scared of flipping the car at that point. Luckily we had slowed enough to avoid digging in too hard and rolling over. The big problem ended up being the windows, which had to be rolled down during driving sessions. Moving sideways through dirt at 30 mph + no windows = LOTS of dirt in the cabin. I just finished vacuuming for the 3rd time this weekend. There was even dirt in the CD player. One tire was flat from being rolled, which we fixed pretty quickly. The track guys closed the session with a BLACK FLAG... boooo.

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So you think you've seen it all. Been there, done that. No surprises anymore. Life is getting too predictable.

If this sounds like you, I recommend coming out to the Silicon Valley and greater Bay area for some bike riding. I too thought I had seen it all until recently.


A couple of weeks ago I went out for a spirited Sunday morning ride with DGal, Buffalo, teammate John C and Don, who was out visiting from Cville. We started out with a climb up Old La Honda, descended the west side and had just turned onto west Hwy 84 when near disaster struck.

Hwy 84 west is not unlike the Afton descent on Rt. 250, for those well versed in Virginia cycling lore. It's fast and pretty straight, with woods lining both sides. Typical bike speeds are 40+ mph.

DGal and Buffalo (Tim Noakes) were ahead on the descent by maybe 100 meters, riding closely, when out of nowhere, a deer bounded down an embankment and onto the highway at 20+ mph from the left hand side.


It happened so fast, and looked really odd. My thought process was, over about ~ 0.5 seconds:
1) What the hell is that?
2) An alien is attacking us from the woods!!
3) Why is the alien choosing DGal? That guy gets all the glory.
4) That kind of looks like a deer.
5) Definitely going to hit them and it is going to be bad.

Somehow, some way, the deer slid just enough behind DGal to only clip his rear tire with a hoof before flipping over the curb into a ditch. DGal rode it out with nary a wobble. No one could believe it, including the guy on the Harley riding beside me who almost crashed from freaking out so hard. I really did think it was an alien at first, which was funny. You don't see deer doing the Electric Slide with front legs in the air very often.

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Man, sometimes I really miss the Charlottesville cycling scene. Fortunately, Cat 3 ally P-Hen just sent me a friendly reminder of the good old days via USPS: some kit from Team Extreme/CRC Racing (i.e. Crashing). I feel so ALIVE now!


In fact, stop strapping shit to yourself or your bike. If it doesn't fit in whatever pockets you have, leave it at home or hire a sherpa.

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Sheff is flying home to VA again. This time, I mean business.


Tomorrow the transformation will be complete (and fortunately has nothing to do with White Snake). Christoph has just left for racing in Bermuda, and I will arrive in Charlottesville Wednesday night to take over his role as Chief Boot Knocka in the 434. I am coming into town for a long weekend of moving the rest of my junk out to California, riding, drinking and more weddings!

Christoph has been awesome enough to loan me the use of his Stabbin Cabin for the week. It is a totally sweet old-ass stone house on a huge farm right beside UVA. I think there are dead people in the basement from the 1700's, but nothing in life is free, right?

It's taking some serious work to pass for Christoph while I sub for him this week. I dropped 15 pounds thanks to:

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