Race List

More of a note to myself, but possibly helpful to others:
http://more-mtb.org/forum/showpost.php?p=22171&postcount=8

Great ride this past Sat. with Foley at Patapsco. Fast and furious. Joe flies.

The new bike is treating me right, a full review to come after a few more rides.

Epic Pogue Fever

I'm approaching nearly a week of not being on the bike, and nearly a week of being sick. I did put in some solid hours last week, but this week has been empty. Each evening I go to bed hoping that I'll be able to rally in the morning and head out for a long commute in. Each morning I wake up with a raw throat, hacking up lung butter and decide against it.

This virus, I've named it "the fever" was nasty and apparently it is quite widespread. I ran a fever somewhere in the 102-103 neighborhood all day Saturday into very early Sunday morning. We were in Nebraska for a wedding, but I was in candyland. I could not think clearly at all. I was dizzy, delerious and halucinating slightly. All of this from the comforts of the Holiday Inn in Lincoln NE. While my wife went to wedding events, I sat in the room moaning like a mental patient and watching back to back episodes of trading spaces. If fevers do 'cook' your brain, I suppose that was what happened, that show didn't help matters either... So this recovery is taking a while.

Meanwhile, just before I got sick, the night before in fact, I did two things. Picked up a new bike- Specialized Epic Marathon, and went to see the Pogues at the 9:30 club. The bike is great, but I need more time (obviously) to see how it rides.

The Pogues were great too. Shane McGowan is crazy. He was wasted when he came on stage and proceeded to drink what appeared to be an entire bottle of whiskey while doing the show. I hope it was a prop, but I don't think he does props. At 49, he looks like he's about 70, at least from where we were standing-that's what a lifetime of hard drinking and drugs gets you I suppose. But he can still sing, mostly, although he can't really talk- all we could really understand was a slurred "thank you" while his other comments were garbled by the drink.

If he didn't drink and do drugs to the extent that he did/does would his amazing music be what it is? It's sad to see such a success accompany such substance abuse, I wonder how interrelated the two are.

A Little Sleepy

I woke up today at 5:30 AM with the goal of getting out to Clarendon VA for the 6:30 Squadra Coppi HON (Hills Of Northern) Virginia ride. Amazingly I actually woke up and got out my door at 6:05, which is cutting it close to make it to the Java Shack in Clarendon, but doable. I made it, but no one was there! Not only that, the coffee shop wasn't even open yet. So I did the ride by myself, and although I made one wrong turn on one of the hill intervals, I managed to do nearly the whole ride from memory. Clearly the Coppi team hasn't started this ride up yet?

I'm dragging this afternoon.

Icycle Race

A friend of mine sent me this link today http://www.torontocranks.com/wp-gallery2.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=3242&g2_page=1. I guess living in Canada leads to such crazy cycling activities. I can't tell if these people are running studded tires? They must be. Some are leaning WAY to far to maintain an edge on the ice. Check out the photos and see if you can tell. I can't say for sure. But since there are no wipe-out shots I would bet there is something up with their tires.

Wasted Day

The weekend was all planned. Big plans, lots of things to accomplish but all within reason, so long as things went smoothly...

Saturday went as planned. My wife and I demolished our kitchen and dining room- we're remodeling on a somewhat large scale. We got it all wrecked and down, and even carted the detritus off to the dump in our neighbors' pickup. Having neighbors who are willing to lend their truck is a big money saver-totally awesome of them to help us out here.

I had appointments lined up with two contractors, an electrician and plumber both of whom came and got a look at the project we want them to help us with. Although we are doing most of the work ourselves, there are some portions that are best left to the professionals, due to time and complication of the project.

Plans started changing when my friend AV called Saturday night to bail on our Sunday morning riding plans. He had a great excuse, his wife had just given birth to their son! So after congratulations and discussion about everyone's health and status I let him off the hook because I'm so understanding.

I think AV's call was where things went off the tracks. I was supposed to pick him up ultra early, at 8 am for a ride up at Gambrill. With the early departure now not necessary, I sort of let down my guard at our neighborhood gathering that night. It didn't SEEM like I was going overboard, but I did. As it has happened in the past, I had too much wine on a relatively empty stomach after a long day of manual labor. Then I ate a few slices of pizza and the group, although smaller, moved on to our new neighborhood drinking establishment. There I proceeded to down several beers, 4? I don't know. Too many, that's for sure.

I awoke to a sour stomach and headache. Katie was out the door early for a hike. I rolled around in bed for a while thinking that I really should get up and eat something to help my stomach. But our cupboard was bare. Instead of rallying and getting my butt over to a supermarket or local greasy spoon I lounged and my stomach got worse. Then I started vomiting. There was nothing to vomit. But, my stomach did not see any logic in that reasoning. Around noon I ate some corn chips and watched TV. More vomiting. Ramen noodles, more tv, more vomiting.

Damn. What a waste! I watched several movies, Red October, Hellraiser 4? I don't know, it was bad and I wasn't really paying much attention- some biking show on OLN. I recovered around 6:30. It was one of those 1 hour recoveries, after several hours of retchedness and waves of nausea I went from crappy to fine in about an hour. But the day was over, nothing done on the house, no riding.

I love my wife. She laughed at me, but didn't get mad. She made us a nice mild chicken and rice dinner. She sang me a nice song she learned off of the new Tossers album, something like "Fat drunk and lazy" appropriate I think! I went to bed at 10. Today is going much better.

Winter Training

I've been trying my best to stick to a regular training schedule over the past couple of months. It's a challenge. Getting out there on those cold mornings is tough. Getting the right gear together for the temperature means constant changes in layers and gear choices. One thing that deffinitely helps is having neighbors who ride the same commute. Knowing that someone else is waiting for you to show up is one of the better motivational factors, we meet and ride/suffer together.

On the other hand, for those days when the timing doesn't work or I'm too lazy to get outside, the trainer has been there. I'm riding on a Kurt Kinetic trainer. There's a good review of this machine here.

I rate this as a good workout, but I have not been tracking my workouts with any sort of training device such as a powermeter or a heart rate monitor. So whether I am really doing a real workout is questionable- I do sweat alot though. Those two items are something I should consider getting. In fact I have a heart rate monitor, but the little transmitter belt is lost. So I've been doing the sessions by feel- a typical workout is 15 min warmup, 12 min hard effort 1 minute cool down, 15 min hard effort, 2 minute cool down and so on for just over an hour.

The first race is in 7 weeks...