Fa Fa Friday

Gotta be honest, I'm ambivalent about Friday right now. On one hand I am required by law to look forward to Friday each week as it ushers in the weekend and allows me to enjoy longer bike rides, family time, and of course I don't have to work (in theory, reality is very different these days). On the other hand summer is here and that means every free day is filled with doing something. Add it all up and the weekend means I dig myself a deeper sleep hole that I never seem to climb out of. Sometimes it's just much less tiring to go to work.

Some comments before I talk about biking for a change.

Cliffy

"Hey man, the deal was the weigh your clothes after they DRY in order to get an approximate measure of how much salt you are losing."

Well now this is interesting. I would really need to do this before a long ride, say at least 3 hours because in order for my kitchen scale to even register it would need to be in the realm of 5 grams. That's a lot of salt but if it does weight that much then it sure would be an indication I lose a colossal amount of salt. Interesting thought. Something to think about.

Jake

" all i really want to know is how you manage to "pen" all of this on your crackberry w/o your fingers falling off. :)"

It's all in the thumbs, which admittedly hurt some days especially when I cut my thumb nail too short. It's funny this thing has allowed me to become consistent with my writing though. I would love to be able to sit down and just write away but frankly I get too bored too fast if I have the choice to get up and do something (like eat or drink beer or not ride my bike). Being forced to sit on the train for an hour each way gives me a lot of time to burn. The ride is much shorter for me when I'm clicking away on this.

Jake Part 2

"norm, i know EXACTLY how you feel. one very unexpect week in the midwest = many beers + kids are sick + me not sleeping = me not riding < class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">bueno. that is the formula for fatarse."

I guess it's really not as bad as I've been feeling but it still does fee like there's a world of shit to wade through some days, most days. Plus summer equals lots of food and beer every time you turn your head. How does this serious biking thing square with that? I don't know which is why I hesitate to call myself a serious biker at this point. Not that there's anything wrong with that it just doesn't jive with everything I've been doing since January.

Maurice

"Wow just came across this. Good read, I can relate, with 3 kids. To each age its share of things that keep us busy though... Get out and race man! With all this biking it would be a waste not to, plus you don't ever get any younger; unless you push yourself. Cheers! Maurice"

Yeah no doubt it keeps you busy no matter the age. In some ways I feel like it's much more tiring this year than last year but then I'm pushing myself more this year. It would be a waste if I don't end up racing in the next few weeks but I'm not sure about Stewart just because of the bike. Still uncertain right now but I will say I'm pretty fed up with the biking industry at this point.

There's still a lot of year left and the 2 Allamuchy races in addition to Ringwood and the Dark Horse 40 are out there. Plus there's Michaux as well as some MASS enduro stuff that I'd love to squeeze in. Plenty of time to try not to cramp at a race again. I should really put a priority on fixing my bike this weekend.

I'm going to save the coffee comments for another coffee post next week. Now I can actually talk about how my biking is going. Yes I do still ride my bike even though I may be a tub of lard. I've pretty much gotten out of the Build 1 period and I'm sort of slowly transitioning into the Build 2 period. Last week was whatever I could put together. This week has been a little better.

I posted on Tuesday about being too busy so there was just a blurb there. Here is the ride link from that:

[ride link missing because motionbased is down]

I have to say I really enjoy the pattern of the route on the map and I may start planning routes in an attempt to draw pictures. Now that would be a neat little endeavor. I think Tuesday's ride looks like a spoon:

[no image which makes this part of the post useless]

I mentioned I felt good and when I picked up with the paceline riders I was almost surely the strongest of the group, though who knows if they were a light group or not but hanging with them was zero problem at all. They tried to keep it zippy as they passed but I had much more power than the collective and closed the gap without even having to stand. So that made me feel pretty good about where I am right now.

Then I rode Wednesday before we went out to my parents:

[ride link missing because motionbased is still down]

Nothing special in the pattern there:

[nothing special here so no big deal]

That was a nice solid loop with a fair amount of climbing. The real nice thing on this ride is that everything clicked on Wednesday. I climbed better than I have all year which makes me think things are coming together in some ways. To keep a 17.1 on that loop with that much climbing is a pretty solid pace for me. Very happy with that ride.

There was no Thursday and Friday rides because of the rain. I have to be honest I was pretty happy to wake up at 5:00 this morning and see that it was wet out still. I went back to sleep for another 45 minutes and caught the early train. I think it's pretty official that my motivation is gone. It probably boils down to the fact I'm overtired all the time which makes it hard to wake up and easy to eat too much. I haven't put myself in a position to have a sustainable bike season right now.

The dead bike doesn't help either. Right now the Stumpjumper is still in pieces. I took the linkage off and now I need to tap out the old bearings and press in new ones. Unfortunately I don't have a really long bolt to make it work well but I did find a C-clamp over the weekend. The important thing is to not damage the bike in the process. Boy it really would be nice to have the bike to ride the trails again soon. I find it ironic that the owner of the shop I go to bought a new road bike and gave it to his mechanic as a gift. Gee I wonder who helped pay for that?

My weekend is half up in the air as always. I'm going to do one of the hilly 50 mile rides on Saturday but I'm not sure which one. More than likely it will be the big Califon loop. I think that will be over the 3 hour ride limit I am imposing on myself while I get back in the swing of things but it's close enough. After that I have a birthday party a few towns over. I don't have to go but I'm putting in some karma time there.

Sunday the Stewart race is possible but I don't feel like riding it on the old Trek full-rigid since I haven't ridden that bike in well over a year now. I'm sure it would be fine but I'm pretty unthrilled about the idea overall to be honest. So if I don't do that I'll probably keep it on the road and in the 2 hour realm. Then I can spend some time trying to fix my bike so I can race the LMC on it next weekend.

Just for the edification of the readers, ambivalent means pretty much the opposite (or at least the half opposite if that makes any sense) as indifferent. A lot of people think those words are synonyms but that's not the case. While I was ambivalent about including this at the end of the post, I am indifferent if you care. Now how's that for word usage?!