repress negative feelings or short memory

so its 3 days off the bike to try and see if my legs will heal. this past tuesday nites' crit was going to be super hard. this i knew on monday with the weather forcast having 30-35 mph winds. this means NO PLACE TO HIDE!.. on top of that......the legendary Steve Tilford and another guy by the name of Brian Jensen(rides professionally for Successful Living)were on hand. add even more speed with the gusty winds, man o man............were we all in for a world of hurt!

so these 2 factor led to a super bad day for myself. 25 minutes in i was spit out the back. i took a free lap and got back in in the back. lasted another 10 minutes and was again spit out. gave it one more effort for another 10 minutes and called it a day.

thru the rest of the evening, my nites effort continued to naw at me.......why was tonite so bad. well........the tilford factor, the wind the speed....more than anything it was just a bad day. got to looking at my cycling diary and realized over the last 7 weeks i have raced at least 1 day with the majority of those weeks containing 2 races a week. I count the tues nite crit cuz its at least as long as the cat 4 races i do and harder as well. mix in to saturdays where i doubled up in both the 4's and 3/4's crit on a couple of saturday spring fling crits(over 2 hrs of crits on both days) a 3hour marathon bike race on another saturday......this all adds up to 12 races overr the last month and a half with no specific rest time........i was due to have a bad day. i was fried. the last to shifts at the fire house i was worthless. i felt like i had a little elf lodged in the back of my legs stabbing me with needles. my legs were just fried. i dont ever remember having this extended time of muscle soreness in my legs before. 3 days of rest my legs actually started feeling better.

saturday morni ng came early today and i was itching to see how i or my legs would respond today. ted and i hooked up with the trek store guys on a regular sat am ride that leaves a coffee shop from next door to the bike store. ted and i joined them in the middle of the city limit sign sprint and were in 'bridge up' mode from the get go. we raced to join them only to have to time trial up to the front group. we worked thru those that were left behind in the sprint and joined 2 guys about 200meters off the front 3. 1 of the 3 was former u.s. nat'l 24hr champ Cam Chambers. so needless to say the front 3 worked us over. we kept a pretty constant gap only to see them increas after about 6 or 7 mile into the chase. towards the end of the ride afterlosing one of the 4 in our group, we finally joined the front 3 with about 4 mile left in the ride. oh well, they had let up and were cooling down. 30 minutes of all out 'race' effort and 4 hours and 65 miles back at my house...........well, i can put tuesday nites disaster behind me. i put in my share of pulls on the effort earlier in the morning with ted. you are only as good as your last ride.....at least with my short memory.

oh, the sun came out about a mile from my house. 64 miles in the blustery cold and the sun finally comes out.

spring here???