Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Sweet, sweet sunshine

Tuesday after Western Washington was bad. I woke up to a serious cold, and crawled to school and back for day 2 of the term, which was spent staring at the lectures through watery eyes and praying not to get called on. Wednesday was worse - the full cotton head made sure I did nothing but sit in class and go home to sleep.

Thursday I felt much, much better. And I decided to try and spin a little bit. I met up with the Thursday nighter for somewhere less than three miles, even after taking a long head start. I was realizing that breathing hard was going to be an issue.

Friday: no ride. Sleep in. Drive up to Portland for the PSU omnium.

Saturday: 9 miles in to the road race around Hagg lake, pulled out. Lungs just hurt too bad. No going hard, no breathing deeply, all a mess. Done.

Sunday: Sit in at the crit around Swan Island, for 55minutes while the group stayed together. My lungs hurt the whole time. 600m to go I took off and stuck for 3rd (2man break up the road). I coughed for 20minutes and hacked up some serious hard gunk.

The whole next week was a disaster. I felt sicker than before even though the mucus was thinning and the exterior symptoms were getting better - the body-ache stuck around a few more days.

This weekend we hit up Central Washington - home of the worst winds in bike racing. And for the first time in two weeks, I actually rode my bike somewhat hard and somewhat long. But no pop, no zing, no legs. And one of the hardest, windiest, most brutal courses I have ridden - the kind of course where you can drill 400w into a headwind on a flat road and barely crack 15mph. Super suck.

The good news is that it looks like we locked up Nationals qualifying this weekend, eating the most points of the D 1 schools in the race, so I'll be buying a ticket to Colorado for early May - by which time hopefully I'll have figured some stuff out and gotten my S&%t back together enough to have some fun and do a respectable ride - mostly, feel good in the legs and good in the head.

No comments: