Baby J

I went for a ride on Sutherland and Baby Jesus today. I’ve had better rides. Ever since my feet started bothering me I’ve had some bad experiences on the bike. I’m still heading out every day, but often the rides have been less than 2 hours. I know, sitting around the house, that I want to get out, see things move, and take some deep breaths, but that experience, for a large part, just isn’t happening when I actually go ride and I think it’s mostly due to my feet.

It was cloudy and cool today. Perfect for fooling around on Baby J. But I just didn’t have anything. Asthma was kicking my butt on the climb up Sutherland. Why? I have no idea. The humidity was very high, which is usually a good thing. Not today. The lack of air really sapped my legs part way up Suthers. I felt like crap. I was crap.

Aching, uncomfortable feet are not good for technical riding. Confidence was very low. The trail kicked my butt, plain and simple.

The wind kicked up for the return ride, making the usually fast and flowing return on 50 year slow and frustrating. Things picked up when I jumped onto the old course for the ‘Great Pumpkin’ race. It’s back in business after supposedly being ‘obliterated’ back in 2000. It rides pretty well, except that the only really hard part was re-routed. There was a nice left hand switchback that challenged me (at least in the race). Good to see the old trail back in action.

I’m trying to deal with my feet, but success has been minimal so far. I’m running out of ideas, unfortunately. Perhaps the testing has been insufficient or wrong itself.

The week was busy on the school, TopoFusion and volunteer front. I got a lot done, I guess. It was a very rushed, almost unpleasant week. (Perhaps this unpleasantness is related to having bum rides).

Is there any point in feeling like you’re always behind? Well, recently I have actually been behind. But the feeling lingered longer than it should have. There are so many things that I could spend my energy on that it’s tempting to say “I’m going to do everything” and then feel like I’m always catching up. The fact is I’ll never do most of the things I could do. I just have to accept it. Finally I just stopped and did nothing–out of spite.

On the horizon we have a Mexican adventure with Lee in the works, a Lemmon Assault with Louis and more ‘big’ rides, as soon as I can figure a few more things out.