Tour of St. Louis- a week late

Well, I actually raced my bike last week. It was kind of an accident... that is I was in St. Louis and I had my bike and there was a race.

The race was the Carondelet Circuit Race- the Saturday morning race in the Tour of St Louis. I was really not looking forward to it. I had been sick all week, not sleeping and coughing compulsively. However, I had preregistered and I couldn't bare to let that $30.00 go to waste.

I'm going to be honest, I sort of shocked myself. I was in good enough shape cold or no to be a part of the race the whole time. I even tried a solo breakaway after a couple other teammates were brought back. Its always far far more fun in a road race to participate than to just hang on.



The last two laps I was actually trying to move up to the front. I even had the legs to do it, but the holes kept closing. Oh well. Who knew, I enjoyed racing my road bike cold or no cold.

I have heard rumors about this thing called spring

Yep, its here. I am realizing that I had not updated this blog since December when I did my last cross race. I would like to say that there is a good reason for that, but really it just has to do with not having anything to say.

This winter has been spent trying to finish my phd and get the hell out of Champaign. Its looking like this might actually happen... although I probably won't be the hell out of here until the end of the summer. Due to the odd place my life is in I have really just been riding or running periodically with no real "training plan". For the last few years I have focused on running until the middle of April and the St. Louis Marathon. I didn't sign up for it this year so I've just been tooling around.

The weird thing is that I am actually in pretty decent shape. My power data seems to indicate that I am already riding around where I was the middle of last summer! This is a little confusing, the only think I can figure is that since I have been riding fairly regularly when I normally would just be running I managed to keep some cyclocross fitness- who knows. Regardless, I am happy about it. I am thinking that this unstructured crap is going to have to go away soon... Perhaps May. We'll see.

Anyway, I have been thinking about when to start my season. I have missed two MTB races already due to 1) it getting cancelled and 2) my being lazy. I am thinking I might hit up some of the Tour of St. Louis races in two weeks, but for some reason I'm just not at all excited about road racing this year.

I don't know. I am scaling back my expectations this year in terms of volume and what I hope for from myself, and honestly the bikings been treating me well so far... I guess only time will tell whether or not that continues on with racing as well.