Any riding that I planned to do on Thursday morning was washed out, as Ma Nature unleashed storms and torrential downpours on Michiganderburgh all day and night. As I type this on late Friday afternoon things remain dark, dank, dreary and soggy and I have no desire to leave the house for anything other than beer and pickle juice (I’ll explain that in the near future).
This morning I sat at the computer drinking coffee and mapping out a ride that I hoped would come close to yesterday’s mileage and have me in the 40 to 45 mile range. Then I walked upstairs.
Sometimes you get up and go for a bike ride. Sometimes you don’t. Today I did not, but I did stick to my almost daily plan of doing something outside and doing something creative by going for a quick three-mile hike in the woods in between bits of real life.
There has been a real lack of activity the past few days, so blogging has been on the back burner. I mean do you really want to read endless blog posts on how I am now in the midst of an obsession with bastardizing Chinese and Asian cuisine to the point in which they are unrecognizable? Probably not, so I save that for Exchange-O-Gram. Do you really want to read endless comments about football, how eating hot dogs at 11 PM gave me gas, and complaints about life’s minor annoyances? Probably not, so I save that for the Twitters.
I have been struggling to find topics to write about as well as the time to write about them the past few days, so I have been laying low [the web now breathes a world-wide sigh of relief].
Until now [digital boo].
Sorry?
After a blazing hot (and slow) dirt road ride on Monday, I made special efforts to hydrate (with water) better Monday night (when not digging hooks out of my thumb). This proved the right thing to do in advance of another hot (for Michigan) 90˚ day on Tuesday.
I realized today that I haven’t ridden a mountain bike on singletrack (dirt) in roughly six months. I rode some snow packed fat bike trails on the Farley this winter, but I haven’t been on dry, woodsy singletrack in six freaking months! That’s sort of unacceptable… except when it is.
This week has been kind of crap, and not just because last week was so freaking awesome! It’s been crap because of the weather (snow, seriously?), not riding outside thus far, annoying, dirt bag student neighbors (who will hopefully be leaving when the semester ends), poor sleep, and varying degrees of self-inflicted, random acts of stupidity from me (of which there were many).
On the brighter side of the week: no one died (yet), I haven’t gained the weight–which I’ve been working hard to lose over the past two weeks–back (yet), Wifey hasn’t left me (yet), B-Man doesn’t hate me (yet), and my various Trek bikes (how did that happen??) were not part of the galaxy wide skewer recall (yet).
Earlier today I had the idea to take a look back at one of my early endurance mountain bike races and rewrite the race report from my current perspective to see how different I might write it now, nine or ten years removed. I still plan on doing that in the near future, but as I read over some of those old posts on the Soiled Chamois v.1 blog I found myself sidetracked with some mild embarrassment and distaste for the way I wrote and approached blogging writing back then (mostly in the ’05 to ’08 era).
It’s been a while since I had a plan or a goal when it comes to my riding and/or racing. The last time I had a plan was probably back in 2011. We moved to Michigan in the fall of 2010 and my goal for the coming season was simply to race as much as I could so I could get a read on the scene, the riding and the trails. And that’s what I did…
I am forty-three years old. That means that I’m getting older, as well as saggier, fatter and harrier in all the wrong places. It also means that I have endured forty-three winters. I’m not sure how many wet, slush filled shoes, slips on ice, scraped car windows, shoveled driveways and bouts of uncontrollable cuss-filled shivering that adds up to, but I’m sure it’s a lot.