Week #3: Sick and Solo

My week didn't exactly go as planned. The cold that I thought I wouldn't make any worse with last Sunday's ride definitely got worse, although I think it was the natural course of things and the ride still didn't really hurt anything. Regardless, it turned into a nasty cough, I lost my voice on Monday, and it's a good thing I held off on sick days during the sore throat phase, because I needed them when the cough set in. I ended up missing all of Tuesday and only working partial days on Wednesday and Thursday.

My three-day weekend was kind of a bust since as of last night I was still dealing with violent coughing fits when I try to sleep, and I'm really only able to get a few quite hours between 2-ish a.m. and whenever I have to get up. It was going to be a semi-bummer weekend, anyway, because Frank has been at an academic conference in San Antonio since Friday morning.

I had still planned on busting out some good rides on my own, but being alone and feeling crappy killed my motivation. I finally got out for a ride today, going back to the "it won't make it worse" principle and because I did feel sort of better. I realized that all the drugs weren't helping my nighttime coughing, so I skipped them last night and felt better in the morning, even if my coughing was the same.

Anyway, despite feeling off my game, I knocked out the Tussey Ridge, Tussey Extension, and John Wert loop today. We have never actually finished this entire loop, because we got lost on our first attempt and then tried a couple of times on weeknights and ran out of time, so we skipped John Wert. I have to say that John Wert was easier than the last time when we were cold, tired, and frustrated, but still pretty darn hard. There's still a lot of "I have no idea what to do with that" rocky sections.

However, I guess I need to figure out what to do with that. Since it was announced earlier in the week, I've been obsessed with the Transylvania Epic's "East Coast Rocks" category. Like the enduro competition, it is based only on the riders' performance on designated sections of the course. In this case, six sections of the most quintessential Central Pennsylvania gnar, two of which were on my ride today. I'll never have the engine to compete for the GC in a big mountain bike stage race, but I'm interested to see what I can do with a year of practice, practice, practice on the rocks.

With my photographer out of town, you'll have to settle for my camera phone shots this week:

Tussey: Allergen style

#gnarselfie

John Wert wasn't as bad as I remembered. Of course, I forgot to take a picture of the actual hard part.