Nine Days Left

Yes, nine days left until Nationals. Man, its creeping up on us! Rehab is progressing nicely. Working out during lunch was a bit erratic last week as I had a few meetings during that time, but I was still able to get out a couple times to swim and once to do weights and spin. While last Tuesday's HART training was the first time I hit the picnic loop since the accident, Wednesday I returned to the scene of the crime on my road bike. I went a bit later to avoid the crowds as I just wanted to crank hard for an hour and see how my leg responded. I went hard and had no problems leg-wise. I was able to keep it around 22mph for the most part. Then I saw Tara doing the lap--hilarious as I know how much she LOVES the fruit loop! Okay, I don't like it that much either, but that's the only place in town where its safe to just pedal and not worry about cars. THEN, I saw the Warship! He was on his mountain bike and it had looked like he hit the trails and he was already in cool-down mode, so I was able to just breeze by him. I didn't intentionally speed by him, I just didn't want to slow down as I just wanted to uptempo for the whole hour that I had. But that was funny to see him there. Craziness.

Went to HART training again on Thursday. We jogged to the pullup bars and did sequences of pullups and cals intermittently. Then we did a tempo run around to the next pullup bars and did more pullups. I felt a bit more fleet-footed this time around. I took Friday off to let my leg rest from the pounding as this was the most running I've done in a while. Saturday we were supposed to go paddle with the Hyperturtles at Hunstville, but they bailed. Good and bad thing was that I didn't get their message until we were at the park. Good because it was a great, cool, crisp morning to paddle. Bad because I didn't want to get up at 5am and rush to get there on time! In turned out to be good altogether as we had the lake pretty much to ourselves for over an hour. I was then thinking about driving to Rocky Hill later that day to support the 24hrs of Rocky Hill participants, but I got lazy and decided to recover some of the sleep time I had lost this morning.

Instead, we woke up early again on Sunday to get to Rocky Hill in the morning for some team training with Lisa and Tom. We got there and the place was packed with mountain bikers! Since I had to bail on our team for the race, Jason Maloney took my place. They were in all doing well, but Nick had a couple of bad laps during the night, including a crash, which he has yet to detail to me, so they were a bit behind when we got there. After a few minutes of socializing, we left them and Mo, who had brought some beverages for the racers, and mounted our bikes to do some hillwork at nearby Buescher/Bastrop. That is a nice, hilly road that is very nice to ride early in the crisp morning air. Again temps were cool, so we didn't have to worry about sweating our brains out. All in all it turned out to be about 30+ miles of hills. We got back to the ranch to change out to paddle those damn sevys. Apparently Lisa hated the idea more than I did, because as we got down to the put-in at the Colorado river and started pumping up the boats, I suddenly hear a loud pop. We all immediately laugh out loud as we know that the sevy Lisa was pumping had blown up, bursted at the seam. Irrepairable, we gave up on the idea. We had all paddled the boats a week or so before, so we weren't too worried about it.

We went back to the race to find out that the team of Nick, Tommy, Weihan, and Jason had placed 2nd, AGAIN! I figured that since they upgraded to Jason that they would win this time. Oh well. It looked like everyone had a great time. We shortly headed to Whataburger and then back home after the awards ceremony. The last couple of days I went to HART training and it felt good. Monday I didn't bring my bike, so I was on foot the whole time, for about 7 miles. Yesterday we were on bikes for the whole time, about 8-9miles. Good times. Hopefully I can get out for lunch and swim a bit, to loosen up the muscles. All right, that's it, get back to what you were doing. PS, this is a clue for my Halloween costume...