The past few days have been filled with random rides that featured varying degrees of misfortunes, aches, issues and minor successes, like forgetting to charge my Garmin 500 for weeks and having it die before I even made it to the dirt roads on Friday. If you do a ride and there’s nothing to record it, did it really happen? I’m joking of course, and in my case my ride, the stats are best left unknown.
The gun people have the NRA in their corner defending their right to blow big holes in things. Cigarettes have the tobacco industry and all those old smokers trying to look hip on ventilators in their corner. Sugar, which has come to be blamed for everything from childhood obesity, to Obamacare, to erectile dysfunction, has nearly the entire American food industry in its corner. And pasta? Well, pasta has me to champion how freaking good it is when eaten in moderation (although I prefer not to) and prepared with love (Note: please make a rainbow arc with your hands as you read the word love).
Pasta can warm the cockles of even the most staunch carb hater. Yeah, I’m looking at the Atkins people with their three meals a day of cheese & bacon but can’t walk up a flight of stairs and the ninety-nine dollars a pound, grass-fed, Cross-Fit doing, high horse riding Paleo people! Go ahead, hate on pasta! I’ll still be here eating it and loving it along with millions of Italians, the state of New Jersey and that hot Italian cook with the giant head on the Food Network. We be tight.
My ride plan today included a 45 mile road ride. Mother Nature’s supposed weather plans had me alter that to 25 and some core work on the big physio ball of pain and some mid-evil stretching exercises.
Pauline Ferrand Prevot (Liv Pro XC Team) has started two races in the 2014 UCI XCO series and has won them both. She not only won them, she crushed them, winning in Nove Mesto, Czech Republic by 2:50 over Catharine Pendrel (Luna Pro Team) and in Albstadt, Germany by 2:59 over Gunn-Rita Dahle Flesjå (Multivan Merida Biking Team). To say she has dominated the two races would be an understatement, taking early leads in both and never looking back, leaving all the other women to fight it out for 2nd place or pray for a mechanical.
Today, the wind was gusting hard and at times sounded like a freight train roaring past the house… it was the perfect day to seek refuge in the woods.
As any reader of this blog knows, I am not a smart man. Intelligence is a rare commodity betweenst my ears and I did nothing this weekend to prove any different.
Yesterday (on the road for 41 miles), and today on the trail, was all about the scale. No, not the scale that tells me that I’ve gained 40 pounds since 2005 when I started this blog, fancied myself an endurance mountain bike racer who eventually realized he just likes to ride his bike on trails, gravel and roads, drink beer, eat good food and sometimes race, but the pain scale. I have to say, that even though I don’t like pain, I like this scale way more than that fucking, lying piece of shit in my bathroom… Forty pounds my ass!
This week has been made up of the following: riding, bitching, moaning, hate, expanding my liver, stretching, core work, ice therapy (to that area that makes up the gulf betweenst my two giant love handles) and adjustments to my riding position. Right now, things are going pretty darn, not bad. In fact, today I completed my normal 16 mile loop and on a pain scale of 1 to 10 I think it was merely a 4… maybe even a 3. Woot!
To go back a smidge, I got out yesterday on the road bike. I felt like shit… I felt great… I felt like shit… I felt great. Grrrr…
While I didn’t feel great over the entire 41 miles of crap Michigan roads, I felt well enough that I didn’t want to sell all my bikes and take up drinking and masturbation as my “go-to” hobbies (they will remain in the 2 and 3 slots).
And I as I said above, today’s slow/quick lap felt pretty OK… ish.
Later…. I have a couple other hobbies to take care of.
I finally got around to watching the round 3 XCO action from Nove Mesto na Morave, Czech Republic on Red Bull TV. Always a great watch. The women’s race was utterly and completely dominated by Pauline Ferrand Prevot (Liv Pro XC Team) who won the race by nearly three minutes over Catharine Pendrel (Luna Pro Team), who seems to have recovered quite nicely from an early April collarbone break.
In other dominating news… Nino Schurter (Scott-Odlo MTB Racing Team) returned to the XCO circuit (for now) after recently completing the Tour de Romandie with the Orica-GreenEdge team and appeared to be in fine form.
In the end Schurter won by just just eight seconds over Stéphane Tempier (BH-Suntour-KMC) but held the lead for nearly the entire race and at times looked as if he would pull away and take the win in the same way as Pauline Ferrand Prevot had done in the women’s race earlier.
The UCI XCO series now moves to Albstadt, Germany this weekend so it should be another fine week evenings spent watching some awesome race action.
Photos via the UCI XCO Facebook page.
Back be damned! Back also be rubbed, iced, heated, stretched, rolled, medicated, electronically stimulated and cussed to hell. Things are slowly getting better in the back department, at least on the bike.
