Watching from the sidlines: I am ready to go.

After a solid week of recovery I am to "officially" start training for the 2009 season. It's nuts after completing my race schedule and putting it out there has filled with me with motivation. I have been looking forward to start training towards some goals and also to have a plan.

Trevor and I have my season and training phases pretty dialed and I have come up with a pretty repeatable week in terms of when I do certain workouts. I like having all my training done in the morning and at lunch. Being able to train a lunch is huge for me because I often lack motivation after a morning workout and then working all day. So as we have things set up right now I should be done working out by early afternoon and just be able to relax after work... and maybe get some more Vo2 Maxxed posting done.

Training last week was pretty mellow. It was a recovery week. The weekend started off solid. On Friday morning I hit my local trails (Mt. Crippler) for what used to be my weekly King on the Mountain run prior to foot injury. I can't even tell you how much I have been itching to run up there. I have been riding there a lot and I would always thing about running when I was riding. So friday was the day.

I had to start with a .25 mile on the road and in the .25 my fool felt just ok. It was kind of tight and I still had a little discomfort. It was no worse than it's been, but no better either. About a mile in it dawned on me... my foot didn't hurt anymore. Seriously. The pain was gone... I started laughing out loud. The rest of the run was awesome... no pain in my foot. And since that run the pain seems to be gone... completely. Weird.

Saturday morning I headed up to Mission Viejo with Tom and Trevor to meet up with Ryan and ride the Counting Coup course. We were also hoping to meet up with another crew including Luke, Justin, Allison, and Eric. We were kind of lagging and though we missed them. The ride started out great until about an hour into the first climb. Then my pedal started slipping off the spindle and making a grinding noise. I pulled over took it a part and the bearing inside was smashed. Not good. I rode the second hour climb with a jacked pedal. I was able to get through it but it was annoying and little sketchy descending. So after 2 hours of climbing it was time to descend.

Tom, Trevor, and Eric (who had caught up to us) nailed the sketchy descent. I took it easy because my pedal and I do not like this descent... at all. I end up taking a little spill... super mellow and landed it a bush. Not a big deal but I some how manage to smash my front brake lever. Luckily Ryan had some tape and I was able to rig it and I could finish the descent being able to somewhat use my front brake. At this point there was no way I could ride for another 2+ hours with my bike falling apart. So we called it a day. I am bummed since we drove up there to ride. We still got in 2.5 hours and 5,000+ ft of climbing so it wasn't a total loss... and it being a recovery week for it's probably a good thing.

The ride:


I ended the week with a killer Sunday. We were up early and headed down to Mission Trails so Beth could race in the Xterra Mission Gorge 15K trail race. I was signed up too but I don't want to do anything stupid since my foot is feeling great... even though once we got there I was itching to race. So instead of racing I met up with Matt and Tom to run the course. It was a great run in perfect conditions on a tough ass course. I CAN'T WAIT TO RACE!... But I am going to. It's the smart thing to do.

the run.



Beth kicked ass. Enough said.

more good beer.