Winter Cycling in Southern California

Winter Cycling in Southern California

While most of the country is either too rainy, cold or snowy to ride during the winter, cyclists in California, especially Southern California do not have an offseason. Rainy season in Southern California runs from November to March, with rain storms occurring every four days or so, usually. There has been little rain despite the El Nino warnings. We do have another month to go, but it looks like another warm, dry winter so far.

One of the benefits of our fair weather is that pro cycling teams come to the area to train during January and February. This winter the Rally Cycling Team, formerly the Optum Health Kelly Benefits Team, was in Oxnard for their annual training camp. The men’s and women’s team occupies a house on Silver Strand on the Oxnard Beach and ride every day in the area for three weeks in late January and early February. I have encountered them on a few of my rides around the area, and they are a very young, thin and friendly bunch of cyclists. The men’s and women's Canadian National Cycling teams were here for a couple of weeks. And last week I ran into a photo shoot of the Hagens Berman–Supermint women's pro cycling team co-owned and led by Lindsay Bayer.

Over the years, I have gotten used to pro cycling training camps. You are huffing your way up a long climb and a bunch of younger folks glide by wearing identical kits. They say ‘Hi” and move on. They are always friendly which is a plus in these encounters. And it is amazing to see how much stronger pro cyclists are than the average cyclist. On television, among themselves, they look average. But in real life, pro cyclists are a little smaller than average, typically the men are around 5 foot 7 inches tall and weigh about 140 to 150 pounds. Walking around the finish line at the Amgen Tour of California, I always get the sense of being big, although I am 5 foot 10 inches tall and weigh 170 pounds. I met the Schleck brothers. I wanted to hand them a couple of burgers.

We do not get too caught up in the Strava KOM competitions around here. Since a few teams train here and the Amgen Tour comes through our area almost annually, many of the local routes have pro cyclists at the top of the segment lists, since some them upload their rides into Strava via their Garmin bike computers probably. It helps, and hurts, to have Amgen, the main sponsor of the Tour, headquartered in our county, Ventura.

Stage 3 of the 2016 Amgen Tour has been labeled the Queen Stage, since for the first time the Amgen Tour will tackle Gibraltar Road above Santa Barbara and cut through Oxnard and Ventura, two of the larger cities in the county. Many of the local cyclists have ridden large portions of this stage. The feed zone of the stage is on the road where I do my after-work training rides along the beach. This year the KOMs in the southern part of the county will become unreachable as have the KOMs in the regularly traveled central part.

I recommend that you have a chance to attend a pro cycling stage race, make an effort to go. You cannot get any closer to a pro sporting event. And after the race, you can mingle and chat with many of the cyclists.