Week #68: Baby Steps

I have now completed my second week in Pennsylvania, which was vastly different than the first, as I started my new job. Everyone is very busy getting ready for a big upgrade of the software that we use (Talisma) on May 12, so I've mostly been shadowing and going to meetings as everyone frantically tests and discusses what's left to be done before the upgrade. I've been doing what I can to help out, and hopefully I'll be able to make some actual useful contributions soon. Overall, I am very impressed with the people, general resources, and level of organization here, so I think that things will be pretty good once I'm a better acclimated part of the team.

More focused riding equals fewer pictures, so all I have is this testament to how much we like green stuff.

Obviously the start of work cut down on the amount of mountain biking we could do compared to the week before. We had to miss Tuesday night, because the 80-degree temperatures of the day before turned to 30's and snow about the time that I got off work. I got to ride little bit of Tussey on Thursday night, but Frank's chain broke less than a mile in, so it was kind of a bummer for him.

On the weekend we worked on redoing a couple of the Trailmix sections that we had covered the week before and tried to do them faster now that we have our navigation down. We were successful and cut down about 30 minutes off of our previous best for each route. Now we need to start putting sections together for longer rides until we can do the full Trailmix route at once.

I've put together a loose schedule of our long rides every weekend for the next few weeks, culminating in a full Trailmix route two weeks before the actual Rothrock Trailmix and Stoopid 50 race weekend. Since both races are on the same weekend, we have to choose one. I really want to do the 50, but I've made a cutoff goal that we have to complete the Trailmix course in under five hours prior registration if we want to sign up for the 50. Otherwise, we will just do the Trailmix race and hope for a PR in that.

It's so much more motivating training for something where I can actually make checkpoints and see progress towards actual race performance, rather just following a theoretical plan and hoping that more more watts in a workout actually equal going faster in the race. This is probably another reason why I liked Death March training so much; my whole schedule was centered around hitting checkpoints leading up to the race and everything else was simply in support of that. It makes it a lot easier to decide to what you can and can't let go if you start to feel a little cooked.

Anyway, I'm not sure if we will meet out sub-5 hour checkpoint in time or not, but we're giving it our best shot. Our progress in the last week is a good sign. I can't wait to get the move over so that we can get settled in and more focused on trying to meet that goal.

Okay, we did stop for a #scenicvistaselfie on North Bear Meadows Rd. on Sunday. Coulda been 35 minutes faster.