The Weekend that Was...

I took it easy this week after racing at White Lake. I still did all my workouts, but stepped down one day and kept them kind of moderate. This weekend I started to get some pep back in my legs. I rode the mountain bike twice, rode road twice and ran hills too. As we get closer to 2x-Mitchell I am going to focus a lot on hills. Run them, ride them, brick them...love them.

Gina asked me to include more details/dirt about what I think about when I am training. What a great question. I wish I knew, but to be honest sometimes it is hard to remember. Here's a list of topics in no particular order:

1. Music: There is a song constantly playing in my head, and today it was Ryan Bingham's Hard Times. JB can we get that tune?

2. The weather: Jim Cantore rides with me everyday. I just hope I don't become a storm story if the wind picks up.

3. How much fun it is to be out here hammering.

3a. How much fun it will be to kick up my feet after this workout is done.

4. Challenge: how sweet it is to push, and push hard. It's so damn fulfilling.

5. Pain and suffering, mmm....when the pain comes it sometimes becomes this internal battle concerning taking my foot of the gas, or staying the course. Most times I just stay the course. The fear of stopping, having to face the fact that you quit, that is by far the worst. I always set a minimum distance for a workout. This is a must hit mark, everything that happens after that is nice, but if you fail to hit the minimum performance metric you should have stayed in bed.

5a. The fear of failure...I think about it all the time.

6. Food, Gatorade, Coke...

7. The heroes: Dad, Lance, Laird Hamilton, Cal Ripken, Stonewall Jackson

Today when I was out Mtn. Biking I was thinking about some wise advice given to me by a mountain biking sage, "trust the bike, it will take you over things you thought impossible." So there I was screaming down a the power line road, bouncing all around when the front wheel got holed up in a crevice and I went barreling off course way to fast to correct and into a thick pack of thorns, and briers. I cut up my arms, legs, face even my lip. Sad part was it was the beginning of the ride, the minimum was in no way met, and I had to ride on. I managed to re-group clean the blood off, pull out the thorns and once again trust the bike.

I'll post this weeks workout schedule tomorrow.

Carry on,
-E