Race Season Approacheth

As it gets closer to race season, I get more and more nervous, but more excited! It's been a crazy month and a half, completely changing the way I train and how I look at cycling. The past couple of weeks have been marked with huge improvements but also serious problems for me.

Thanks to Don, I learned (finally) how to corner and bump elbows. I'm not braking through turns as much anymore, and I'm taking them much faster. A lot of it was a lack of confidence, but there was definitely a lack of technical "know how" as well.

Problem areas included nearly a week recovering from my crash (see my last post for gory details.) It didn't really seem too bad at first, but my legs were super sore for a few days afterwards. Then, to make matters worse, my legs started spontaneously cramping again during a run and haven't been the same since.

A trip to the doctor resulted in a knee brace, a physical therapy routine for me to do at home and a battery of blood tests, which showed a significant increase in my muscle enzymes that may be causing the cramping. The brace helped a lot, and I've spent hours hooked up to the stationary trainer in the basement watching Frasier reruns and pedaling furiously to get back in the game. Swimming has also helped in soothing my muscles, and I think a lot more cyclists could benefit from this cross-training (or maybe I just want to get more of the team into swimming!)

With racing only a week away, it's all starting to feel more real to me. Triathlon is a totally different animal- there, if I do badly, it just is about me. Here, I'm terrified of screwing up or doing badly and making the team look bad. I'm just not used to being part of a team yet!

In the meantime, tomorrow will be the first time in two weeks (yikes!) that I'm riding outside (barring cornering drills and biking to all of the different campuses on my mountain bike), so I'm really happy about that. Hopefully the doctor can figure out why my legs are acting up and how to fix them. For now, I'm going to ride as hard and as well as I can, get to work on a race day press release, and stick to the physical therapy!

I've been reading a book by Johan Bruyneel about how he masterminded 8 Tour de France victories, and I love this one quote from him: "If you’re going to expend that first big block of effort and energy to participate, you might as well go ahead and give whatever it takes to win."

Rutgers Cycling has already expended the effort and energy training for this season, so I hope that this Spring has a lot of victories in store for us!