Attitude

I knew I was going into the race with the wrong attitude. The LAMBRA criterium championship was held last Saturday over in St. Francisville on the same course we'd used for the West Feliciana Classic back in May. This was a course that didn't exactly play to my strengths, which is to say that the ability to suck wheels wasn't very helpful. So when I headed off for I-10 that morning for my early afternoon race I was kind of dreading it. The course has a short but painfully steep climb on it that totally dominates the race.

So I wasn't feeling particularly optimistic when I lined up with Dave for our 45 minute Master-40+ race. In contrast to my own attitude, Dave was totally psyched for this race. He'd been anticipating it for weeks, doing hill repeats to be ready for the sprints up the wall. He had the right attitude. If all that wasn't enough, there was a King of the Hill bonus that awarded points for the first five times up the hill. Kenny was there too. This was going to hurt.

For the first few laps I was feeling reasonably good, and in fact was no having any particular difficulty with the climb, which is to say it wasn't quite as terrible as I'd been expecting. Up ahead, Kenny and Dave were battling for the KOH points (Kenny got the $100). Nonetheless, I was only a few laps into the race when I thought to myself, "This is like a criterium course with all the fun parts removed." Once we got through the first five laps without a break going off the front, things settled down a little bit, but I was starting to struggle on the climb. My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton.

We were probably down to five or six laps when a big gap opened up on the climb. Luckily Donald Davis lit the afterburners on the downhill and pulled us back up to the lead group. That took a lot out of him ... and me. We were down the second to last time up the hill when Tracy Martin attacked hard halfway up the climb. When I saw him launch, all I could do was look down and say, "shit!" I'd really been hoping they would wait until the last time up the hill. The front of the pack responded, but I didn't have anything left and found myself off the back with Chuck and Peter. With the lead group, now down to only six including Donald who was not quite in contact, chasing Tracy full-bore, there was no way we were going to close it up on the bell lap. Chuck pulled us around for most of that lap and we sprinted for 8th place. It took me forever to cool down after that one. I had a splitting headache and felt seriously overheated. I guess maybe I was a little dehydrated. I found a first-aid kit with some Tylenol in it and washed it down with a bottle of beer. Eventually I started to feel better, but I never even considered entering the Cat. 1/2/3 race later in the evening. On the plus side, although Tracy held out all the way to the finish, Dave was able to take the pack sprint for 2nd place. Anyway, it was actually a pretty nice event despite my lackluster attitude.

Sunday morning I thought I'd wake up with sore legs, but instead I woke up to pouring rain and perfectly fine legs. By noon the sun was shining, so I went out to the levee and rode all the way out to the "new" end. They recently added another mile and a half to the upriver end of the bike path, making for a nice 45 mile out and back from my house. I'm still wondering why I didn't have sore legs on Sunday. I guess my problem must not have been in my legs.

Meanwhile, back at the office, my new computer arrived on Friday. This will be replacing my six year old machine and I am not really looking forward to the transition. I am looking forward to the new faster computer, of course, just not the whole process of switching from one computer to the other. I set it up on the edge of my desk this evening. Next I'll have to get Outlook and email set up so I can download Office and WS-FTP and Acrobat Pro and Dreamweaver and Firefox and Photoimpact and get it working with the network printer and institutional networked applications, and transfer over twenty or thirty gigabytes of archived email and other documents. I'll probably be running back and forth between the two computers for a couple of weeks.