Drive (long and verbose)

(I really didn't think this post was going to grow into an recounting of my life story, but it did. My apologies. My life story is boring, and verbose.)

Bummed - because I'm skipping my race tomorrow to focus on my health, which hasn't been so great all week.

Setbacks, though, have the tendancy of sharpening my focus and determination. "Setbacks". To be fair, my versions of life's speedbumps are pretty small. Mostly it's just a sniffle here and there, struggles with inclimate weather, flat tires, etc.

When I injured my knee in August at a MTB race I had about 2 weeks off the bike, some infected stitches, but then it seemed to be over. Fast forward to October, when I had an infected blister on my heel, and a weird boil thing on my hip. Antibiotics - check. Ready to rock and roll again. Fast forward again to New Years Eve, when another of the boil things popped up on the back of my left calf. Ouch. And, since I was in Massachusetts, I couldn't really see a doctor. It's a long story, but Mass has state run health insurance (of which I am a big fan) but if you're from out of state, and uninsured, makes it pretty f'in hard to see a medical professional without a $2000 ER visit. Word. So as weird infection thingies kept popping up on my legs (by the way, I love my legs, I treasure them - they're the tools with which I pursue my passion) I couldn't see a doctor for a couple weeks until we made it back to Reno. Luckily I saw the same physician's assistant I'd seen before, and she put 2 and 2 together and concluded that I developed a systemic infection at the time of my FIRST infection (from those stupid non-dissolving dissolvable stitches) and whenever my immune system was compromised, or I had a small injury, or a little teensie weensie ingrown leg hair (hey, who doesn't?) the little bugs on my system would go crazy on it and I'd get an infection. So she gave me a monster dose of doxycycline (the same antibiotic I'd been taking for each infection - it's cheap, it works) plus another one, in the hopes that it would knock it out of my system. Yay, cured! Right? Wrong.

Two weeks ago I started getting the boils again. Just a little one to start with, and I thought, 'maybe it's just a fluke, right?' Wishful thinking. I got a big one behind my knee a week later. So I went in to see my physician's assistant friend at Urgent Care. And . . . she lanced it. Yeah. Gave me a nice shot of local anesthetic (ow), took a scalpal, sliced my leg open, squeezed, and then stuffed it full of gauze (or something like that). Ow. Oh yeah, and she took a culture and sent it to the lab so we can figure it out once and for all. Went back in to have my gauze stuffing removed, and before I could protest she stuffed some fresh stuff right back in. Anyway, the whole infection thing has left me feeling lousy, kept me off the bike (it's like I have an incredibly painful golf ball behind my right knee), and pretty much made this the most blah week I've had in a little while (fortunately it was a rest week, so resting was on the schedule, though maybe not to the degree I took it).

Okay - so, not to sound like I'm bragging or whatever, but I think I'm pretty good at handling pain. The re-stuffing of the gauze was the single most painful 30 seconds of my life. Good. God. Make it stop. Which it did, pretty quickly.

Fast forward to today. The lab results came back! And, much as suspected, I have MRSA. Which conjures up images of necrotizing bacterial infections, but it's not that bad . . . yet. haha, just kidding (I hope). So I'm going back in for the final gauze removal tomorrow (whilst my teammates kick some Snelling butt), and to get some new, MRSA-spanking antibiotics. I hate being on antibiotics, but I hate having pockets of pus in my legs more.

So, what was the point of this whole long, over-sharing story? Well, I've had a shitty week for training and pursuing my of my goals. I'd lost a little weight prior to this, and I'm pretty sure, with the lack of activity and the drowning of sorrows in chocolate, that I've gained it back. Whatever.

My season started great - with Cantua and Pine Flat. This has been a minor setback. I have 2 weeks until the Madera Stage Race. 2 weeks to get back on track. 2 weeks of solid training.

It's raining out. Like, cold, cold rain. At least it's melting the snow. It's supposed to rain all day tomorrow. Tomorrow, I'm going to go ride for 3 hours in the rain. I'm going to strap on the fenders, the Craft winter riding pants, rain jacket. I'll be grateful that I have the health, that my body does everything I ask of it, day after day. After my ride I'll take a long hot shower (a "thank you" to my cold corporal self), and eat a good meal so my body has everything it needs to recover from the stress I put on it. So I'll be able to go do it again, the next day. When Cody proffers ice cream I'll eat some fruit instead. Because I want to win races. Big races. Lots of them.

Monday Morning

I'm sitting on the couch, Cody's MacBook Pro on my lap, a cup of coffee in hand. Yesterday it snowed about 10-12" here, and this morning I can't even bring myself to look out the window. Our thermometer says it's 25'F out there. Today will be a roller day.

But first! I'm going to work! The big news is that I got a job (in addition to the middle school strings assistant job). And it's a bike shop job! So a new bike rests somewhere on the horizon. Anywho, I'm working at Peloton Bicycles. It's a small shop (literally, the floor space is tiny) with a small crew, but solid. I like my bosses, and I have vastly more experience than the other employees, so I feel like I have something positive to contribute. That's a nice feeling! So I'll be working there a couple days a week, still helping with the orchestra on my days off, and squeezing in as much bike time in between as I can. I finally signed up for my Certified Personal Trainer course so in my other spare time (ha! Spare time? What's that?) I'll be studying to take the exam for that. Professionally, things are finally coming together!

Last weekend I had my very bestest friend come visit from San Francisco, so I neglected my bike a little bit and ate too much chocolate, but the weather forecast is for things to melt and clear up so I'll be making up for that this week, and hopefully heading back over the hill this weekend to race Snelling with my team. I've been feeling just a touch under the weather lately, and I had an awful experience at Snelling 2 years ago where I went there "a touch under the weather" and came up so sick that I was on my ass for 10 days. So if I'm not 100% I'll probably bail, because I really, really, really don't want to repeat that experience. Good riddance.

Anyway, I guess I should go face the ice and snow, get myself ready for my sweet new job, and clean the cat box. Ahh, what a glamourous life I lead.

2010 Season Kick-Off

Ha! Check out the dude behind us - dying! And we're all smiles and sunshine.

I - can't - go - any - faster! Crap!

Oh, the agony.

More agony.

I don't have much to say about the Cantua/Pine Flat weekend, except that it was rad. We didn't have the numbers to earn upgrade points, but I had a blast duking it out with my new friend Rikke for two days, mixing it up with the 35+ ladies on Saturday and the 1/2 ladies on Sunday (hey, guess what? I outclimbed a couple of them!). Rikke ended up nipping me on both days, but it was awesome having someone there to challenge and push me (and vice versa of course). We're both looking for our upgrade, so not having even a measely 5 girls show up to race in the 3's was lame, but we made the best of the situation and flogged ourselves and eachother. Bike racing is awesome, and even more so when you feel strong (I did), and good company is just the icing on the proverbial cake. Radical. Life is good.

Speaking of awesome - Cody deserves huge credit for not only chaffeuring me around all weekend, feeding me (on and off the bike), dogsitting while I raced, and offering moral support, but also giving me the most killer leg massage on Saturday after the first race. Ahh, if only he could come to all my races. Sadly, he has a life of his own.

Now I'm home in Reno, it's 60F outside and sunny and gorgeous and the birds are singing. There are 1000 things I should be doing, but right now I think I'll just go lay around, in the sunshine, on the hammock, and read a book. Life is good, indeed.

Wasted

Finally! My training gets really on track. I was struggling a little bit in January - weather, travel, motivation - but lately both my head and my legs have been where they need to be. Still unemployed (for the most part, more on that later) but totally taking advantage of the free time to ride ride ride. All this free time also makes it so much easier to attend to my rest, recovery, and nutrition needs. If/When I have a 9-5 it's going to be a struggle to not have this kind of time.

So, on the employment front, I am sort of employed. I'm working 5-10 hours a week helping with a couple middle school orchestra classes. For those who aren't privy to my dark life before bikes, I was a musician. Violin, tuba, and tenor saxophone. So now I'm using my latent violin skills for (minimal) financial gain. It's actually really fun. I've always loved teaching (spent a number of years teaching music, and was a music education major for a number of years) and I've really missed playing music since my jock-transformation. It doesn't exactly pay the bills, but it helps a bit. I've got a plan in the works, so hopefully soon there will be more profitable news in the job report.

Last weekend was our Touchstone Cycling team camp. It was rad - the girls are nice and awesome, and there's sooooo much serious talent on the team. We raced a crit on Saturday, and I was happy with my fitness, and very surprised that it didn't hurt as much as the first crit of the season typically does. I'm incredibly motivated by the strength of my team, and I feel like I have something to contribute. Good all over.

Right now I'm totally exhausted after finishing a third consecutive day of hard training. I love this feeling - coming home from my ride with barely the energy to eat a good recovery meal. Jeez . . . I think I just reached the end of my creative energy (not that my blog is especially creative, but you get the point).

Photo Essay

Cozad, NE - located on the 100th Meridian (whatever the hell that means). On the way across the country we stopped here so I could ride. Typical small town - we'd been parked for 2 minutes while I got dressed and a cop came up to ask us what we were doing. "Reno? Well now that's a big city. What're you doin' 'round these parts?" He was pretty cool when we explained, though. And I had a really nice ride in the sun.

When the brutal cold and snow of Northeastern Massachusetts finally broke my will to ride (fortunately only 2 days before we left) we did some skiing instead.


I finally got to Salem (actually I'd been there once, earlier on this trip, but only because I got lost on my bike, crossed a huge bridge, and found myself there)! We went to the Essex-Peabody museum, which is HUGE (especially considering it's only 20 minutes from Boston) and awesome. Next time I'm totally going to the witch dungeons (hahahaha, take that, kids who were mean to me in high school!).

Yes, the sunset was lovely. Cold, but lovely.

The way the sunset was shining on the trees it made them look like they were on fire. Just lovely.

Went to Cody's brother and sister-in-law's house in NH and built a sweet bouldering wall in their basement. Now I've got a serious itch to do some rock climbing (an itch that will be scratched in a major way this Friday at Touchstone Climbing in Sacrameno!).

This was my New Year's Eve ride. It was snowing (umm, duh, really Mare?). Weee.



Last day of the drive across the country. Serious boredom has commenced.

I saw this guy when I was riding in Maine! New do-before-I-die goal - ride my bike in every state. Even Arkansas. This trip I added 2 states to my list: Nebraska and Maine. Let's see, so I'm at: 1. Nevada, 2. California, 3. Oregon, 4. Utah, 5. Washington, 6. Colorado, 7. Massachusetts, 8. New Hampshire, 9. Vermont, 10. Montana, 11. Nebraska, 12. Maine. Okay, only 38 to go.

Proof positive I was in Maine. On an island, no less!

More scenic Maine.

That pretty much chronicals my 3 weeks "vacation". In fact we did a lot more than that, I just don't have photo evidence of it. I'm still unemployed (a fact that will hopefully change soon), finally logging some good training, and looking forward to Touchstone Climbing team camp this weekend! I'm sure there's more to add, but I'm totally fried from my ride yesterday (Cool thing #67 about unemployment: Rest days really are quite restful!) and can't think of anything interesting to say.

Eatin' chowda and hanging at the ba' (that's bar, to you non-New England types)

It’s snowing. Again. It wasn’t supposed to start until noon today – I guess it came a couple of hours early. I know I’m going to go ride, but I’m putting it off, putting it off. Struggling to find the motivation to spend 30 minutes getting dressed, bundling on every layer I can, then searching for a hill that takes more than a minute to climb up. Those are scarce around these parts. “These parts” being North-eastern Massachusetts. If you head west you can find “big” climbs (it really puts things in perspective when the definition of a big climb means anything lasting 10 minutes), but I’m without transportation. I’d considered taking the train, but that would end up being something like 3 hours each way, as you have to go south into Boston and then get on another line and head west. So I know I’ll do my intervals here, on a rolling little bit of a climb that might top out at 3 minutes if I pace myself. It’s just this week that my hill intervals will be so difficult (another cyclist perspective – when the difficulty associated with training is not the work-load, but finding a route that is long and hard enough) because on Monday we’ll be heading home.
And home, what awaits? Well, I guess I totally dropped the ball on the goings-on of late report, but to sum up, my return to Reno will involve selling of anything not necessary to life (my bike IS necessary to life) to pay next month’s bills, and a whole lot of job hunting. What will I do? I don’t know – serve coffee, go work at a gym, cocktail waitressing? All options are on the table provided they give me race weekends off and time to train, of course. But more importantly, home brings with it normal patterns and food, huge climbs to ride my bike up, my own pillow, and my dog. Even, heaven forbid I mention this as a positive, but my rollers, and resistance trainer. I know, I know, truly pathetic. But it’s days like today, when it’s just so hard to face the cold winter roads, that you sometimes just need to pop in a DVD and sweat on the living room floor.
I made this trip to the Eastern seaboard to see if I could stand to live here in the winter. I’ve been here in the summer, and if one can get past the poison ivy, mosquitoes, midges, greenheads, ticks, and god awful humidity, it’s actually pretty nice. Winters? Truth be told, they’re a lot like Reno winters, just much wetter. Not Portland wet, but not sunny Reno dry, either. They salt the roads heavily here, and that combined with the dampness has every bit of steel on my bike thoroughly rusted, despite liberal applications of WD-40, which I hate using on bikes to begin with. People don’t seem to ride outside here much during the winter – each day I’ve been out I haven’t seen more than one other person, if any at all. There’s very little shoulder to ride on, as it’s mounded with snow, and drivers don’t seem too concerned about my well being. The cross training possibilities are decent, but no better than in Reno (we have Tahoe for christ’s sake!). And the hills, oh, what hills? Seriously, I know that sounds stupid, but I always feel that, even with the lousy weather and limited ride options, living in Reno affords me the benefit of altitude (our house is at 4500’) and endless long climbs to suffer up. I feel, truly, that living at sea level (since I can hardly afford an oxygen tent) with nothing but flat to rolling terrain to work with will be a huge disadvantage. There are wonderful things here, too. The cyclocross! Oh, the cyclocross! It’s almost worth all the other crap to have a UCI race within 6 hours of you EVERY SINGLE WEEKEND in the fall. Almost.
Well, time will tell what happens. Mostly I want to live in Santa Barbara, but I think that may be a little out of my price range.

Nationals

Okay, my goings-on of late are going to require a separate blog post, so this one is just about nationals!

Last weekend I raced my first ever Elite national championships (of any kind). This one of course was cyclocross up in Bend, OR. As you may (or may not) recall, I travelled to Portland for the last round of the USGP, had a jolly good time, then rented a car and drove to Bend. Bend greeted me with sub zero temperatures and a lot of snow. I rode the trainer, ran on snow covered trails, and spent a lot of time that week with my feet up. Ahh . . . the good life. Teammate Beth arrived on Wednesday and we relocated to our host housing for the week. On Thursday I had to go out to the race venue to "work" at the booth my employer (now former, but that's another blog post) had set up. The big news of that day, aside from the slip'n'slide snowy course, was chatting up Kristen Armstrong and Katie Compton, both of whom stopped by the booth within a half hour of eachother.

Anyway, my race wasn't until Sunday, so I had quite a bit of time to kill in the meantime. I had fun cheering for Beth on Friday when she raced the 30-34 race, and I ate frites and hot chocolate to stay warm (and subsequently arrived home a bit more well padded then when I left). On Friday night I was getting ready to go out to dinner at the Bend Brewing Co. with Beth, when I reached in my bathroom bag and jammed my left middle finger into my shiny sharp new razor. I pulled my hand out and was horrified to see that a good chunk of finger tip had been lost in the process. After much elevation, pressure, and raiding of the house's Man Bathroom (the guy we were staying with is a flight nurse), the bleeding stopped, and Beth utilized her Air Force buddy first aid to help me patch it up.

I finally got on the course the next day and the relative warmth of the day had softened things out quite nicely. I have to say, I think the course they set up for nationals was super fun! The changing conditions changed the technical aspects of the course as the week wore on. After a couple laps I'd determined that I would be fine racing with my mangled finger as long as I A) didn't have to shift into my big ring (or could do so by reaching over with my right hand) and B) didn't have to use my front brake, which was really easy to avoid during my pre-ride.

Things froze up overnight, so when we arrived on Sunday morning the slop from Saturday had turned into frozen ruts, and the deep puddles were sheets of ice. There were a couple of races before ours, however, and many parts of the course softened up.

What is it like to line up 98th out of 100 women? Ummm . . . discouraging? Not really, because after such a lousy call up all I could hope to do is improve my position. I had two goals for this race: 1) to not be last onto the dirt, and 2) not finish last. I wanted to take a few chances, and ride aggressively.

The start was fast, but I made some passes and achieved goal #1. Instantly everything bottle necked and we were off our bikes, trying to run up the first little turn and get rolling again. As we remounted I got on a wheel, but girls started passing me right away. It took me about half a lap (at which point I think I was 3rd from last) to realize I was going to have to make some kamikaze passes and be a bitch if I wanted this race to happen for me. So I did! When you're taking the inside line on an icy turn to get around someone, even if you go into it just a little ahead of them, they'll have to slow down and let you by. Sure, it's not very polite, but it's a bike race, right? Gee, did I just figure that out? Anyway, I worked my way up to Beth, who had a somewhat better call up than me. I'd just passed a couple people when, on an off camber grassy hill, I came in a little too hot (taking chances, right?) and my tires slid out from under me before I had time to realize what was happening. I hit hard, wacking my head, shoulder and hip, but got up fast, wondering if I'd concussed myself (I hadn't). I glanced behind me as I was slip-sliding my way up the slope to remount my bike, and saw Beth also running with her bike, and another girl picking herself up from the course tape. Uh oh, did I cause all this carnage? Later Beth would tell me that we perfectly executed the rare and difficult synchronized teammate crash sequence. If anyone has a video or photo of this, I must have it. It must have been a thing of beauty. Anyway, after that I rode a bit more conservatively. My goal for the race was to get up to former Bella Shannon Holden, who finished about 45 seconds ahead of me at both Portland USGPs. I caught her, actually passed her at one point, but she passed me again and finished the race about 10 seconds up from me. I only gave away one more place - on our final lap about 40 of us were lapped by the top women. Katie Compton lapped me in the pits, Meredith Miller lapped me before the barriers, and Amy Dombroski lapped me just after the barriers. I moved way over and slowed down so Amy could go by, and a girl who'd been sitting 5-10 seconds behind me went past! I had slowed down before a slippery little "S" turn so I wouldn't accidentally take out a podium contender, and when this girl went by she totally almost did so when Amy caught up to her in the turns. I was a little irritated, but still felt that I'd done the right thing, even though it cost me 68th place. ;)

In retrospect I'm really happy with my cyclocross season. I set out to have fun and become a better cyclocross racer, and I truly feel I accomplished both of those goals. At the end of the season I was left feeling that with another year or two of hard work I can make contact with some smokin' fast girls. (Top 30 at nationals? That's a good goal.) Anyway, Bend was awesome, and I have every intention of going back next year!