A Stream In Maine

I can't look at any more door submittal crap without going bats--t crazy. Brief interlude. The bathroom wall in the fraternity was an instructional place. Generally in a funny way, not a dirty way. It was a pretty off center cast of characters when I joined, but at some point someone had written "mainstream is infiltrating the house" on the wall. To which someone has responded "I piss on your main stream," which some clever fellow had followed up with "I once pissed in a stream in Maine." But alas, the original poster was right, and by the time I graduated we had become the lacrosse house. Oh well. Nothing against lacrosse, I just enjoyed the weirdos.

My latest fraternity-esque organization (that'd be the bike racing team) is a pretty eclectic cast. We lost a few to upgrades, repatriation to old teams, and the cruel realities of real life. On the other had, we have an equal (I think) number of new guys, all strong. It's a good group. Last year, there were a lot of races where we had a lot of guys. On the one hand it's not that big of a deal because I think (I think) that we almost always did a good job of racing the races how they should have been raced and didn’t do stupid crap. On the other hand, balance among teams is more fun. But there are plenty of teams that will have plenty of relevant guys, and let’s face it we are 3s, which means that there are going to be plenty of new guys rolling through Cat 3 for a visit and tearing us all a new one while they are there.

This week will finish up a big training block. I let the tiger off the leash a little bit last night during some 2x20 intervals. I think that I was often guilty of “going for the big number” last year instead of sticking to the right zones more diligently, where this year I’ve stuck to the right number. What I think I wound up doing was training to do 20’ intervals well, but that takes a funny fuel mix – some anaerobic and some aerobic. By keeping it more purely aerobic this year, I’ve developed the ability to go kind of (from my perspective, versus what I could do before) “holy shit” hard for an hour or more – sometimes way more. But last night I wanted to see what it would taste like to go one notch harder. It was fine. Next week is a scale back week and then next weekend I’ll get a really good test (haven’t done a proper test in just shy of forever) and reset the levels.

In any case, because of my absolute lack of visits to the pain cave this year, I feel totally unprepared for the first few races. I’ll probably get dropped at Black Hills, and don’t have much hope for Jeff Cup which bums me out because I had a great (if hypothermic) race there last year. Then out to hillbilly country for the Morgantown Road Race. That ought to be a fun one, but shit some of those guys are really fast.