Taking a Break

I have decided that I'll be taking two weeks off of racing. After Tuesday's attempt to race at Kelso I had enough of the mechanicals and decided to put the mtb aside until all my parts come in and the bike is 100% ready to go. There are way to many things wrong with my bike right now and the temporary fixes eventually went on Tuesday. My last 3 races have all been DNF's and that takes it's toll psychologically. I really wanted to race at Albion as the course is relatively non technical and it usually has a decent amount of climbing, so it tends to be one of my stronger races. There is just no sense in doing a race where you can't feel confident that you're bike is going to hold up, and it is likely that it'd be another DNF. That's the last thing I need right now, so I've decided to hop back on the road bike. Nationals are a couple weeks away so I figured I'd train a ton on the road bike, with some high volume rides and a lot of hill repeats.

Lately I have been doing most of my rides on my mtb as I need to get better at technical riding, but it had me missing the long road rides out in the middle of no where. It will be nice to get back to long rides for a bit and a break from the race weekend stress of getting everything ready and what not. I don't like not racing but I do need a break. My HR is starting to normalize and my adrenal's are almost 100%. With the weekend off from racing the lower amount of stress should have them fully recovered by nationals.

I slept in today and headed out for a 3 hour road ride to do some sprints. I fully expected to get rained on, but it held off and ended up being a pretty nice ride. It's been a while since I got some good sprints done on my road bike, and it felt a little awkward on the first few. By the last couple I was sprinting a lot better and more comfortable. I was pushing Z3 a lot as there was a decent wind that made for a good challenge.

Tomorrow I'll sleep in a bit and then I'll be heading out to Sydenham for a bunch of hill repeats. I love that climb, I have no problem getting my HR to it's max on that hill after a few repeats, as much as they hurt I always enjoy doing them. It's about 1.5hrs from my house out to Sydenham so it'l be a solid 4 hour ride tomorrow.

This upcoming week I should be back to driving my tractor at work instead of standing out in the sun pushing a field liner across soccer fields and walking a couple extra km's each day. I was amazed at how much more tired I was when I wasn't in the tractor all day. I'll be focusing on sleep and nutrition/recovery this week and next. I'm hoping that these 2 weeks of hard training and good rest should have me in better form for the nationals. My mtb should be fixed this week so I'll be racing again at Kelso once it's up and running and I'll get a few more training rides in on it instead of just the road bike.

Off to fix my seized pedals from the Bai St Paul race.