Wednesday 21 December 2011

Recovering

2 week post op appointment, Doctor says things are healing remarkably well!! This sitting on my ass is paying off. She even okays an easy ride...yippee...it'll be good to get out and start using those muscles again, just "Don't push it!".

So yesterday I make a big batch of spicy chocolate peanut brittle for the boys at the shop, get all geared up for the first time in weeks!! I'm so excited, plan is to spin for half an hour, it's sunny out and beautiful! In the 2 minutes it takes to ride down to the shop to drop off the brittle, I make the decision that it's not a good idea to ride yet :( Not quite pain, but it's definitely uncomfortable, and the chamois is hitting my incision.

So, coffee it is instead, then spin home....my first ride in 2 weeks totaling 4 mins!!!! It took me longer to get geared up! Grrrrrrrrrrrr....and it's sunny and beautiful out again today. Couple more days and I'll give it a try again...fingers crossed.

Tuesday 13 December 2011

Sorry I've Been Lazy

Yup, I'm a flake.....where the heck did my blogging motivation go???? After my super wicked awesome fun trip to Louisville, I kind of hit a wall with the season. What you say?? Yup, long season, plus some colder weather, and a couple cans of CIL paint and I was good and ready for fat and sassy season.

The weekend following Louisville was Island Cup finals, none other then the Ricky Bobby at Western Speedway right here in Victoria. Oh my, how nice it really was not to travel. The course was muuuuudddddy, and it was gnarly cold.....but once I got rolling I had a great time and a great race. Raced with the Expert again, keeping myself in shape for Provincials and the USGP finals in Bend.

At this point I had decided Bend would be the end of the season for me, with my motivation waning for the year and my budget completely spent, it really wasn't looking very positive in terms of being able to go to Worlds in Belgium in January, and being able to train properly until then as well. But I was pretty confident I could squeeze a couple more weeks out of myself!

The following Tuesday I recieved a call telling me to be ready for surgery for my hernia on Wednesday! A hernia you say...haha, yup I've got the old man hernia!! Happened about 5 years ago from a little crash on a recovery ride, and it had finally gotten to the point that it really needed to be fixed. I guess the wait list for this surgery is 14 months, but you know, when you bat your eyelashes at the Dr...haha, noooo, due to being an athlete and going back to work up north (this Friday...uggg) I had a really small window in which I could get this done so I was put on the emergency call list. And when you get put on that list, things happen fast! So I was in full on shut down mode, one last big ride on tuesday.....only to get another call saying that an emergency, a real emergency had come up and I had to wait again.

Well, let me tell you, it's really hard to go from full shut down mode, then turn around and tell yourself you've still got a couple weeks to go....playing mind games with myself. We skipped BC Provincials, just not being really excited about traveling and the cold mud forecasted. I ended up taking a couple of days really easy and come monday I was really excited and rejuvenated to race and ride, completely ready to finish my season off! Half way through a 3 hour ride on Tuesday I get another call!!! Scheduled for my surgery now on Monday, Dec 5th....geeeez. I'm going from up to down to up to down!!!

So here I am, just over one week after my surgery and I'm dying to get out and ride or do something!!! I am really, really surprised how much this little operation has kicked my butt. I figured 2 maybe 3 days of couch time and I'd be able to function normally......nope, I'm just finally starting to feel like "normal". You'd be amazed how many movies and how much TV you can watch in a day. I haven't ever taken time fully off of doing anything, so I'm really hoping that the rest does me good. 1 week of recovery down, 3 more till I can get back on the bike.....I'm determined to let this heal properly, because I sure as heck don't want to do this again!

Not the best way to cap off the season, but it's done. I've had some good time to look back over my season, the ups and downs. I'm not really happy with how my cross country season has gone, besides my stage racing, but I really think that I've learned a lot this summer. I'm thinking next year that I may take a slightly different approach to my racing. It's always been a life long goal to go to the Olympics, but with 3 Canadian women in the top 7 in the World and Canadian women being the top ranked in the World, it's a really lofty goal, but it's absolutely amazing for women's mountain biking in Canada. I can honestly say that I gave it everything and I don't have any regrets about my career....And no, I'm not saying it's over, but different.

I've found that I'm excelling in and falling in love with the multi-day enduro races and cyclocross races....2 very different extremes!! My focus for 2012 will be races such as Transrockies and Furious3, and if I can learn how to swim better some Xterra events, with the odd Olympic distance race thrown in like Nationals and Canada cups. And I'm going to use all of this as training for a kick ass Cyclocross season!! World Championships next year are in Louisville, first time ever on North American soil!!

So again, I'm hitting the pavement looking for sponsors for the 2012 season...it'd be really cool to see just how far I can take this Cyclocross racing with some support, especially when I'm doing half decent as a fully self funded racer against those fully funded racers.... :)

Hurry up 3 weeks!!!