Week #3: A Real Mountain Bike Ride in January

Last week I really began to feel my training load after finally getting back on a solid schedule a couple of weeks ago. Tuesday was a planned day off, and I felt the appropriate amount of tired going into it. I struggled a bit Wednesday and Thursday, but managed to get through everything as planned. Friday I felt like I was coming down with something and ended up working from home all day and skipping my planned weight training.

Saturday I was feeling most back to normal, which was especially fortunate, as it presented a rare opportunity for a real mountain bike ride in January. This winter hasn’t quite been on par with last year’s strong El Nino, but the snow accumulation has still been pretty light. A week of 40’s and 50’s plus rain cleaned off everything that had been sitting, and Saturday promised 50 degrees and no rain, even if it was still damp and foggy.

This definitely does not look like winter.

My Camber was out of commission since I hadn’t been expecting to need it for a while and had the shock sent out for service, so it was it was little difficult negotiating the slippery rocks of Cooper’s Gap on my hardtail with not-so-grippy tires. I even struggled on Beautiful trail, which I had pretty dialed on my hardtail last summer preparing for the Wilderness 101. It’s amazing what six months away and some moisture can do to one’s skills. Regardless, it was still really awesome to get to actually mountain bike this time of year instead of just gravel grinding or doing laps of Accuweather on my fat bike, which has been the bulk of my weekend riding lately.

I was also pretty happy that, since I switched my long day and my interval day due to weather this weekend, I was still able to bang out an interval session on the rollers Sunday morning. Normally intervals the morning after a 3-hour mountain bike ride would be nearly impossible for me, but I handled it pretty well. I know part of it is that I am finally capable of doing chill long rides in Rothrock without completely destroying my legs, but I’m also hoping that it’s evidence that my ability to recovery between workouts is improving. I definitely feel like I’m managing a bigger workload overall than I was last winter, and I’ll need every bit of it come May.

I know that wasn’t the most exciting recap of the past week, but that is the essence of winter training. You just have to keep doing the thing now for the payoff later. So I did my thing, I blogged my thing, and now we’re one week closer to spring.

Week #2: Drill Baby Drill

Okay, so things seem to have calmed down enough to accommodate my goal of returning to weekly Monday updates in 2017. While the first week of January turned out to be a bit of a training bust, I settled in and put in a really solid week last week.

Right now my planned schedule is weights on Monday, Wednesday, Friday (Wednesday sessions are with the trainer, Steve), sprints on the trainer (not Steve) Tuesday, 3-5 minute intervals on the rollers on Thursday, 8-10 minute intervals on the rollers on Saturday morning, easy Accuweather ride on Saturday afternoon, and then long (shooting for four hours) ride on Sunday. Last week I actually pulled that off, and I’m feeling pretty good. My goal right now is mainly just to focus on improving my overall work capacity, which will be my biggest limiter going into the TSE, and to reintroduce some the higher intensity work that sadly got pushed by the wayside last year while I focused on trying to survive endurance races. I know it’s not reasonable to expect daily quality workouts indefinitely, so I figure I’ll bump my interval session for a rest day every other Tuesday and try to stretch that out to a day off every third or fourth as my work capacity increases.

Regarding the other tests from previous posts, I’m still looking at another week or so before I get my Oncotype DX score, which will determine if I need further intervention to prevent a recurrence of my DCIS, or if my left boobie can finally move on to live its life in peace. As for the CBAP exam, I’m starting to feel better about my chances of passing, although I’m still focusing on studying/drilling on one knowledge area at a time, and I’m worried about how I’ll handle it when I’m faced with a 120 questions from across the whole 440-page BABOK at once. Much like my approach to the CBAP, my cycling study skills will need to improve in 2017.

My TSE experience is driven by the long-held belief that even though I’ll probably never have the fitness to be competitive in the GC, I might someday be able to practice my way onto the enduro podium. The latter part of last summer revolved around that idea, as I set out on my new slacker and squishier mountain bike and conquered trails I’d previously been afraid to try. After several weeks of drilling, I had vastly improved my times on most of the TSE enduro segments, but I was still pretty far off the top women’s times on Strava. Of course, none of the top women were from around State College and most had never ridden these trails outside of the TSE, and yet they still posted much better times than I had after weeks of practice. While course familiarity could give me an advantage over someone with a similar skill level, I realized that to be competitive, I needed to raise my game well beyond what was possible from just practicing the same trails over and over.

For the first time since my sadly inept first season of DINO racing in 2006, my technical skills actually felt like an appreciable weakness for me. Sometime along the way my skills got “good enough” and could out-descend most of the girls in Cat 2 XC races in Indiana, and eventually monster truck my way through most of the rock gardens in Rothrock (still not 100% on that, though). Climbing and endurance were how I lost races, so that was where I put my energy. While riding in Rothrock made me feel like a better rider, because I was capable of day-to-day functioning on really hard trails, it maybe actually made me worse in some areas because monster-trucking was all that I did.

I had a rough time coming to this realization during the part of fall where I was supposed to be putting my mountain away and focusing on ‘cross. I felt the sudden need to “fix myself” skill-wise when there was very little time left before winter to do anything about it. This led to a meltdown after a terrible day at the Raven Enduro, where I lost on a course where I’d been practicing my butt off to some girl for whom it was likely her first race ever and who had probably been riding for like a year. I’d almost gotten used to that happening in ‘cross due a dumb thing called threshold power, which I don’t and probably never will have much of, but to have it happen in a skill-based discipline was heartbreaking.

The week that followed was defined by several nights of bad sleep due to the stress, getting a large needle jammed in my boob a few times, roofers blasting their radio and banging their hammer at 7:30 every morning while I was trying to sleep off the stress, and finally finding out that I would need surgery to remove the lump that the large needle had been jammed into earlier in the week. So when I headed to Take Aim Cycling women’s weekend that Friday exhausted, stressed, and desperate for a quick fix, you can imagine how well that worked out. Bursting into tears on the last day of the clinic when I was supposed to share a “positive thought” that I’d brought back from the woods was officially the low point of my 2016 cycling year.

Ironically, I did have a huge breakthrough in my log-riding ability a couple of hours later during an ad hoc lesson that replaced the real ride I was too tired to go on. I’ve actually gotten much better at Accuweather, which is the only “mountain biking” that weather and daylight have allowed since the clinic.

The point of this is that, like the CBAP, enduro turned out to be much more of a challenge than I thought it would be, and it really stressed me out there for a while. Also, while drilling specific trails/knowledge areas can help me improve, I’ve got to pull it together and work on the big picture if I want to pass the test. I guess you can say I moved my test date back, as well, by switching to the three day TSE. Setting a more manageable TSE goal will free me up to do things like go a trip to Pisgah and do some of the West Virginia enduro series without worrying that I’m being pulled away from reconning the Rothrock trails a million times before Memorial Day weekend. Exposing myself to new trails more will help make me a better rider long-term, even if I don’t feel as much short-term confidence on my local trails if I practiced them every weekend leading up to the race. I also hope to get back down to Harrisonburg a few times this year and maybe meet up with Harlan for some one-on-one lessons when I’ve actually slept and I can focus better.

As frustrating as unexpected challenges can be at first, they can lead to great things once the shock wears off. I hate having to study for the CBAP in addition to working and training, but I’m really proud of myself for rising to the challenge and learning to actually study after a lifetime of doing well enough without it. My hope for this year is that I will also break out of my mountain bike rut and take my skill level from “good enough” to actually good.

I also plan on trying things that involve full-face helmets and tiny flat shoes.

Passing Tests

Prior to Christmas break, I had planned to come back in January and get back on my Monday weekly update schedule leading up to my big goal of the Tran-Sylvania Epic. Winter is tough, and committing to weekly updates makes it easier to stay on task leading up to a big goal that seems so far away. Lately, though, winter itself hasn’t been my biggest challenge. It seems that life has other tests in store me, admittedly some of them self-imposed.

The first of these tests was the BRCA genetic test for hereditary breast cancer. I “passed” that one earlier in the week with a negative result. That means do prophylactic double mastectomy, which I wasn’t even letting myself consider as a real possibility due to the mental distress it would have caused if I thought about it too hard, and luckily, I no longer have to.

Despite blogging out my case for declining radiation for my DCIS in my last post, my doctor isn’t letting me off the hook that easily. I guess that’s fair, since standard procedure would be to ship me off to radiation immediate after the negative BRCA test. Since I’m resisting that standard procedure, he suggested a second test, Oncotype DX Breast DCIS Score, be run to help hone in on my personal change of recurrence. If it’s low, I’m off the hook, but if it’s high, I’ll have to rethink my position.

Christmas break looked kind of like this...

Surprisingly, cancer-y tests were still not the foremost exams on my mind over this Christmas break. I have been working up to applying to become a Certified Business Analysis Professional (CBAP) for over a year, and once my breast surgery was over in December, I finally submitted my application and scheduled my exam for six weeks out on January 18. Of course, the call about the DCIS a couple of days later didn’t exactly help me get started studying right away, as I was too busy Googling breast cancer websites instead of reading the BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge). I considered just cancelling the test until the future was clearer, but I decided to still go for it around the 30-days-before no-penalty cancellation period.

...but mostly looked like this.

When I finally took my first practice test with a month to go, I realized how grossly unprepared I was, and I went into panic-study mode for most of Christmas break. I think I’ve done more studying for this test in the past two weeks that I’ve studied for all other things in my life prior combined. I was a bit of a lazy student who got by on a combo raw intelligence, luck, and easy subject matter through high school and college.

I have finally met my match with this test, though. I have been relatively successful in my general knowledge-cramming over Christmas break, but there are still many practices questions where I have to give my full level of concentration and analytical thought to figure them out, and sometimes I still don’t. My original test was scheduled for 8:00 a.m. on a Wednesday in Harrisburg, because that is the closest testing center. I chose that center because it was the closest and they only had 8:00 a.m. time slots. I did not know how serious the process was, and that I would be stuck in a room with no food, drink, bathroom breaks, or any of personal effects for 3.5 hours straight. Trying to do that when I’ve been up since 5:00 to get ready and make the drive sounds excruciating. There was no way I was going to be the “best self” I would need to be succeed under those circumstances.

Despite not wanting to pay the cancellation fee nor pay for another month of practice test subscription, I finally caved and moved the test back to January 31 at a slightly further-away test center. I did this to get a 1:00 slot on a Tuesday, so Frank can go with me as he has no Tuesday classes this semester. Even though it’s a longer drive, I think every hour driven before 8:00 a.m. counts double, so it will still be much more convenient. The later date will give me a bit more time to study and more importantly, the afternoon slot will allow me to go into the test properly rested, fed, and hydrated (but not too hydrated because no bathroom breaks). Given all of that, I’m feeling more confident about my chances of passing the exam, but sadly, BABOKing will likely take away some of my time and energy from training in January.

Finally, there is the TSE, which has somehow slipped several paragraph down in the tests that I will face in 2017. The registration opened on January, so after months of trying to recruit team members with little avail, Frank and I finally got to see the pricing for this year’s team category. With a starting price of $529 per person for teams of 2-4 people, it was a lot more than the $350-400 range I was expecting in January.

Given that completing the TSE is something that I’ve been planning/scheming/dreaming for nearly three years, the price alone wouldn’t have been enough to deter me. Last year’s race format collapsed the previous seven-day race into five-day “all meat, no filler” version on Monday-Friday. To me, last year’s race format was perfect: They combined the three most “meh” stages in one pretty good one, and the Monday-Friday format still gave people the weekends before and after for travel, acclimation, and recovery.

I know that travel isn’t a consideration in my TSE plans, but much like the CBAP exam,  to be my “best self” that is necessary to my survival of such a undertaking, being well-rested and calm going into the race and have time to decompress (not take my pajamas off for two days) after will be. That is why I’ve been decidedly less stoked about the race since announced the change to a Thursday-Monday schedule so “people don’t have to take as many days off of work”. Sure the actual race covers fewer business days, but who realistically puts in a full day at work, does a five-day stage race, and then goes back into a full day of work immediately following, even if their distance from the race allows it? The new schedule would require me to take just as many vacation days and get less rest out of it.

They are bringing back the three-day version in 2017, which is more likely the reason for the wonky schedule change, to shove the three-day race into the three day weekend. The means that the Tussey, Enduro, and Cooper’s Gap stages are shoved together in the last three days of the five-day race. Those are the stages that I actually care about, so I made the decision that the extra money and stress to do the Bald Eagle and R.B. Winter stages weren’t worth it, at least for this already “testy” year. I may feel a little regret at not doing the “whole thing” as I had planned, but I’m also feeling kind of inspired to put in the best three days of Tussey/Enduro/Cooper’s Gap that I can. That’s still not an easy race by any means.

So with that very long explanation of the tests that I will be facing this winter, I will leave you until next week. I need to be studying, and well, studying.

While I've been on-point in the gym lately, Laser Cat time on Sunday and studying on Tuesday seemed to have bumped my riding. Definitely planning on putting in the first hour of 2017 in on the rollers tonight.