Kicking My Own Ass

They seem to be getting along...

It's been a while since I posted about anything other than my new 29er, although I still haven't taken a decent outside, real camera picture of it. That's mostly because the weather has been too crappy to take it out of the garage. It's hard to tell from the picture, but it now has pink cable housing, bottle cage, seat post collar, and a pink on white saddle. It also has a Thompson seat post instead of the Giant branded one that it came with. I've heard lots of bad things about the delivered seat post, so in spite of Adam's insistence that those bad things probably all came from 300 lb guys who didn't tighten things properly, I just felt better using something I knew was good. I'm also super excited to have a mountain bike with a bottle cage for the first time in two years.

Now I just have to deal with the trail condition waiting game until I get a chance to take it for a spin. I guess that's the problem with buying a bike in February, but it turns out that it was the last Small in the warehouse, so it's probably good that I acted when I did.

Anyway, aside from the new bike excitement, my other reason for 2-3 weeks of 29er-related posts is that my training hasn't been super blog-worthy. My Big Blue Ox training plan has been executed with perhaps 80% accuracy so far, which I suppose means that I will only be as strong as a medium-sized pink ox for the OC. I've done more than 80% of the workouts. In fact, yesterday was the first non-optional workout that I've missed, which was due to a tweaked knee and blowing snow conditions at the end of the work day. The problem lies more in the fact that I have skipped ALL of my optional workouts, come up short on time on multiple occasions, and have phoned in a few Zone 2 rides.

All that being said I have also had quite a few significant HTFU moments, riding in all conditions that this above-average crappy winter has thrown at me until yesterday. I've also put in over twice the number of hours that I had at this point in 2009, which wasn't my best winter, but I'm above and beyond anything that I've ever done before.

I was starting to get a bit down on myself for not being super woman until after Sunday's ride, when Emily and I put in 50+ miles out on 446 because no other route was clear of snow. For non-Bloomingtonians, that means 25 miles out-and-back of boring, boring riding with more wind exposure than the average route around here. In my mind, it was a nice day because it was sunny, but it was also in the mid-20's and windy with plenty of leftover snow patches. I expected to see tons of cyclists, because everyone who would be out would probably be on that road. However, I only saw a big group of fast guys, Adam, who caught us around the halfway point, and a couple of others. We were among the few that rode all the way to the end that day, which was pretty cool.

So I wonder, am I being too hard on myself or not hard enough? I think this is one reason why I'm OCD about doing every workout right every time. Because otherwise I can never really come to terms with whether my excuse was good enough. Sure the weather is crappy and my schedule is hard, but would I have been given that schedule if I wasn't hard enough to handle it? I just don't know.

P.S. In case anyone's wondering exactly how many bikes are stashed in our garage/basement now, the answer is twelve.