I know, it's been awhile - May 19, 2011

It’s been a bit, but apparently May is shaping up to be a quiet month; and that’s not necessarily good.

I had hoped to get a big training ride in last weekend, but the monsoon that plagued the area made that impossible, maybe this weekend (mow the lawn, ride my bike, mow the lawn, ride my bike).  With rain likely Sunday it means a Saturday ride which isn’t an issue, it just means that I won’t have a day of rest from my commute week before a long ride.  I was initially thinking something in the 200 mile range, but I think I will go half of that.

I am a little concerned with the lack of big rides so far this year.  While I am way ahead of training compared to last year, the ride I’m doing is also a month earlier.  Last year I had a number of 80 mile rides in and a couple that were longer.  I also had some very intense 60 mile rides.  This year I have a lot of commute miles.  Darn weather making things so difficult!

I’m not worried about finishing my big ride I have the power to do it, but I won’t have had a chance to try out my new food/liquid methodology and make changes if necessary.  Ah well what’s a little adventure.  At the end of the ride is a vacation.  Even if I’m a little worse for wear I will have a chance to recover nicely.  And really I should be able to get two bigger rides in between now and then.

I also started a new book called “Hell on Two Wheels” by Amy Snyder.  It covers the 2009 RAAM that saw the current champion unseated for a race.  She does a good job of “covering” a race that stretched out over hundreds of miles.  I got a good sense of what the riders and crew were going through physically and emotionally so far, without getting drilled down to many personal tangents; so the book in that aspect is balanced.

What it really needed from what I can see so far is a better editor.  She describes the same riders in the with the exact same phrases, over and over and over until I rolled my eyes every time I hit what I came to think of as “the descriptor”.  Little errors that stop you cold as a reader where she is talking about a female rider and then refers to her as a “himself”, this happens at least a couple of times.  This is not a fault of the author, more a fault of the editor.  There are other things as well, incomplete sentences and what not, but that is typical of a first edition.

I know how the race turns out, but the book is still very captivating and I look forward to finishing it.