Danielson: “Foaming at the mouth to race”
- By Steve Frothingham
- Published Feb. 6, 2009
- Updated Feb. 8, 2009 at 12:16 PM UTC
TdG winner fine-tunes TT position ahead of California
Tom Danielson is champing at the bit to unleash at the Amgen Tour of California.
Garmin-Slipstream’s climber is coming off of a team training camp down in Silver City, New Mexico, where he and teammate Christian Vande Velde arrived a week early to get in additional miles in the high desert mountains. Now, he’s spending a week with his old coach Rick Crawford, doing hours of motorpacing up into the mountains around Boulder, Colorado, and getting comfortable in his new time trial position.
In the lead-up to the California tour, Garmin team director Jonathan Vaughters wants Danielson to keep riding, but not kill himself in training.
“One of the things JV wanted me to do was really pull back on my training this week, and really get to the point where I’m foaming at the mouth to get out there and race,” Danielson said.
After a frustrating season in 2008, where he was plagued with injury, poor early season form and personal difficulty, Danielson is keen to get back on top. In 2005, he won the Tour de Georgia against Levi Leipheimer and Floyd Landis, among others, before going on to place 7th overall at the Vuelta a España. In 2006, he finished 6th overall at the Vuelta. That year he again won the Tour de Georgia’s fearsome Brasstown Bald stage just ahead of Landis, but ultimately placed second to him overall after conceding four seconds in the time trial.
As for his ambitions at this year’s Tour of California, where his team will square off against Leipheimer’s Astana squad and Landis’ OUCH team, Danielson declined to predict anything, but said he was ready to go, whether that meant riding for himself or a teammate.
Locked and loaded
At training camp, Danielson played around with some handlebars from new sponsor 3T and found a new position that he liked. He took that position into the wind tunnel, and with assistance from Colorado Premier Training, Vaughters and team physiologist Allen Lim, “came up with a pretty sick fast position.”He declined to give any drag coefficient numbers. “Allen has a calculation where he measures watts at given speed in given conditions, say, 50k an hour on a flat road with a headwind. With my old position, it took me 353 watts to go this speed; in my new position it takes me 315 watts to go the same speed,” he said. “It’s enormous. For me to be able to do it is another story.”
According to Colorado Premier Training CEO Steve Owens, Danielson’s position changed in three main ways: he came up higher, his hands and forearms retracted, and his elbows widened.
Danielson also did some positioning work with the bike fit company Retül.
“A lot of people think pros have their position dialed, and that it never changes,” Danielson said. “But we’re constantly changing our shoes, our equipment, our bikes. And we’re constantly changing as individuals, because of things like injuries. So businesses like that are very, very beneficial to pro cyclists, so we can keep things consistent.”
Danielson will take the start in California on Saturday, February 14, along with teammates Vande Velde, Steven Cozza, Tyler Farrar, Trent Lowe, Danny Pate, Svein Tuft and David Zabriskie.
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FILED UNDER: Road
Steve Frothingham
VeloNews.com editor Steve Frothingham joined the gang in bike-crazy Boulder in early 2008. He is the former executive editor of the trade magazine Bicycle Retailer & Industry News. He also was a reporter and editor for The Associated Press, where he covered three presidential primaries in politics-crazy New Hampshire. His racing career began on a BMX track in 1980 and reached its zenith with several miserable road races as a category 2 in the early 90s. He subsequently retreated to cat. 3, where he has had a consistently mediocre (at best) record ever since, in road, mountain bike and cyclocross events. Follow him on Twitter at @steve_froth