Today, I realised that after many years of mediorce riding & racing, I am back to where I left off. I moved to Chattanooga in the spring of 2002 coming off a good Cat IV season in Maryland. I was the Cat IV RR District 20 / Maryland state champ and was in the mix on nearly every race. I was getting ready to upgrade…
Moving to Chattanooga meant that I not only moved, but changed job role to one of a traveling engineer. Along the way, I became a better engineer, substantially improved my salary, traveled a bunch (400+ days in Estonia!), and generally got away from the sport… although I didn’t fully stay away, I continued to race when I could and racked up bad results for most of the period 2002-2005 especially. 2006 and 2007 were better and better, but mostly still rebuilding years.. So here I am now in Memphis for over a year, back in a plant role at back where I left off. My traveling life meant the first four years were a spiral of worsening fitness…it took two years to tunnel back out. I am glad to be back…unfortunately I am seven years older… but it is not too late. I am still only 32. I am riding a better bike than I had in 2001 and have much more experience in training / racing. So, R.I.P. 2002-2007. It’s on.
Out at sunny king today. This was a good race with the NRC races at the end of the day. In the cat 2,3 field I was only able to get up to 28th at end. Earlier in the race I did some work and put some hurt on, but I couldn’t get away. I am pretty happy with the result given the field. I hope I can continue to improve on these mid-field results to get up towards the front at the end of the race.
More photos:
I haven’t written anything in a while since I have been pretty busy the last two week since coming back from Brookhaven. The timing has been good for that since I planned to take last week as a rest and recovery week. That meant that I still rode, but I cut the intensity way back and did some different rides for variety (like Tuesday’s Bike’s Plus ride and RB’s B-ride which both are 17mph group rides…).
This week, I tried another group ride for the first time: the GPAC Tuesday ride down in Germantown. Like RB’s, this ride is pretty easy to ride to / from being only 5 miles from my place. What was different is the speed… I had a couple teammates at the ride, but the amount of Marx/Bensdorf, Los Locos (local tri club) and Memphis Thunder (another local tri club) riders made it a pretty fast ride. Despite numerous stop lights, etc we managed to average 24-26 mph for several of the 5 mile segments (I have my computer setup to mark out 5 mile segments). So it was a good ride… maybe a bit tougher than I was looking for coming off a rest week, but it will be alright.
Yesterday, I rode my TT bike for maybe the 2nd or 3rd time outside a race situation. Tour of Arkansas in a few weeks features a 22 mile TT, so I need to get used to sitting on this bike for more than 10-12 minutes…
My dad is coming down this weekend from Michigan to visit. We are going to go down to Sunny King to watch me (and the pros) race. This will also be Andrea’s first race with a lot of teammates, first NRC race, etc. I am set to race the 2-3 race myself. We both will have to step up for what promises to be a fast, fast criterium.
