Like it was yesterday

Too many hours on the internet, some things are never lost. I remember this like it was yesterday:

May 23, 2004 04:39:00
Is it really this time
4.30a on a too muggy Baltimore morning
sitting, heresmoking fluttering by before
racing headlong into the warm coastal breeze
a multicolored 100 legged centipede
arging and barging for room in the pack
filled with hope, thoughts of glory
for a piece of die cast gold colored metal
blanket of sleep hanging on so many still
I should be
with them, resting, sleeping
dreaming a life never led
following my shadow, how is it
always ahead of me, predestined
posting silly dreams from my finger tips
flowing this heavy wet morning
I may die, my heart too big for my chest
no romanticism here, just physics
just no room for it to beat as big as I want
breath coming through burlap lungs
wrung with charcoal, and here, sitting
waiting to race this morning
balance kept, notfalling, gliding
through space and time, where is Spring
gone

Funny how that queasy tired feeling before a race is so easy to remember, and how on those morning everything is magnified and burned into memory.

More of why I suck later.

Why I am slow (Part 1)

I started this post yesterday without any clear idea of how I was going to explain the million and one reasons I am slow (on the bike, not like this). There really are so many, so I won't bother with all of them, just the most glaring and possibly (hopefully) correctable/fixable/ignorable/or otherwise changeable.

Focus.

The best bike racer types, whether they're pro, Cat 1/2 guys, or the guys in the 4's & 5's on their way up are really good at focus. For the pros, their ability lies in being able to completely live their lives for 90-95% of the year for their jobs. They're job, which just happens to be riding a bicycle requires more than most jobs. I mean, hell it's not like mine where after exactly 7.5 hours of bullshit work I can leave and stop thinking about data analysis and research design. They eat, sleep, and breathe their jobs. To be a pro, not even the top guys, just a pro means they are able to direct their energy towards one thing with more focus and intensity then I can imagine.

I love riding my bike, racing my bike. I love it, I'd take a shitty day on the bike, riding in rain, snow, whatever, feeling like I've got a twenty pound bag of sand hanging off my waste, anything, I'd take the feeling of being out there over the best day at "work". The problem is that I just don't right now, have the ability to focus what little energy is left in me after I give to the "musts". You know, work, wife, house, bills, food, errands, all the garbage of ordinary life, etc.

The thing I love to do more in the world than anything just doesn't fit. Or, rather that I haven't yet figured out how to make it fit with real life living. That's what those guys who show up on to the Psuedodrome on Wednesdays can do that I can't. It has very little to do with genetic predispositions, equipment, and all the other. They're just better at living a life and still racing bicycles.

The most ridiculous part of it is that when I'm out there riding, I feel so good, it balances me, makes me happy, makes all the less desirable "musts" seem to fade away. That's the problem though, the more I ride the more my focus turns to the bike and away from things that I just cannot ignore. I know both can be done and done well, just haven't figured that out yet.

So I sit and get a little squishier around the middle, my bike gets a little dustier, and I get a little bit further from where I want to be.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

The snow falls sideways,

In big flakes right outside of my window. I'm sitting here hoping that a jet engine or something will fall on my head because I don't want to face another crap day at work. No I don't ride my bike to work, I should but I don't. Honestly, because I can't force myself to wake early enough to get ready and make it there in time. I don't do a lot of things on my bike that I should, like training.

I haven't so much as sat on my bike since the Dirty Dozen. That makes 80 whole days without turning a pedal. Fuck. I don't know why exactly, primarily though I think it was the damage done to my body by doing that ride. I did the dozen with exactly two herniated discs in my lower back (between l3 & l4, to be precise). I remember getting home and never being more satisfied and never feeling so stupid. Seriouly I couldn't stand up straight for about two weeks and have ever since that day had a ridiculous pain/numbness in my left leg. Hooray.

And of course almost immediately after that I decided to give up being a newly christened non-smoker. Brilliant.

So, maybe today I'll ignore the numbness, the fatness (remember it's been 80 days, and I was never exactly svelte), and the general malaise that comes from winter in Pittsburgh and hop on the trainer or the rollers to hurt myself a little bit.

Here's to being back on the wagon.