On Hold

Well, after a nice morning ride on Monday that included a bit of the sloppy stuff, I fired up the computer and got to work. The weekend's results got posted to the LAMBRA website (still waiting for some of the Cat. 5 results that weren't entered), and then I moved on to some real work that involved wading through about a hundred capability statements and/or research proposals. It was more tedious than difficult, but nonetheless consumed most of the afternoon and evening. The scratchy throat I'd been fighting since morning slowly grew worse, and by 7 pm I had to concede to the inevitable. I was coming down with a head cold. Crap. There was little mystery as to it's origin. A couple of the gymnasts who had been staying at the house since Friday had been sick, so the source was obvious. On the bright side, at least the medicine cabinet had been restocked. By bedtime I was sucking on Zinc lozenges and wondering if I'd be able to ride in the morning.

Tuesday morning it was raining and wet and nasty and the head cold had continued to progress, so I put my training plans on hold and dove back under the covers. I spent a lot of the day in front of the laptop and TV, shuttling back and forth between work and TDF coverage (an epic stage for sure) and the medicine cabinet and the refrigerator. It seems that whenever I'm sick like this there's a little voice inside me that keeps telling me it will all be better if I eat more. (It's the same little voice that tells me that the co-eds on campus don't notice I'm older than their parents.) Anyway, Jerry is having surgery on Friday to repair whatever ligaments were torn when he crashed last Saturday, so that will probably put him off the bike for a couple of months. It's almost preferable to break a collarbone if it saves the ligaments because even without surgery a collarbone usually heals enough to let you start riding again in about five weeks; even less if it's repaired surgically. Vivian has also just found out that she had some ligament damage from her crash during training over a week ago.

So this morning I again put the training ride on hold despite the dry streets, which BTW have been in very short supply around here lately. The throat was less sore but the head and chest congestion was now in full force. I didn't think I could take another day of rattling around the house, so I swallowed some Sudafed PE and headed off to work by way of Starbucks. I'm not entirely sure I'll make it to the end of the day, but we'll see how it goes. I'd really like to make it to the training race at the Superdome Arena this evening. It may turn out that all I can handle is just riding out there and back, but even that would be an improvement at this point. We'll see.....