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Rest Week

This week is a training rest week. I tend to stretch the definition of "rest" week and sometimes get a little lazy. But that also keeps me from taking myself to seriously...and often it takes a whole week of not being serious to have an impact. So this morning I dropped Terry off at school and then headed to Ft Ord for an early morning ride. It was supposed to be a sprint workout--my favorite--but it didn't happen.

See, before I left the car I grabbed my little point and shoot camera and dropped it in the jersey pocket. And since I had it with me, I just had to use it. First I went to the fishing hole...

But I don't think there's been any fishies there for awhile. Then I cruised over to the old shooting range. No one has been shooting there for awhile either, but some pretty things grow there now...

Then I saw some art someone decided to add to the side of the building. Or at least someone thought it was art. Others likely have a different opinion...

And then there was an open door on the other side of the building. Why is it that you always look in an open door when passing by? Inside, light was streaming through a long-gone window...

All that to say I didn't really do my workout today. And I didn't mind at all.

Note: You can click on the photos to see them a bit bigger, and while you're looking at them nice and big, moving your mouse over the left or right hand side of the image will bring up an arrow so you can scroll through all the images in this post. A couple of these photos were edited with some photo-editing software called Color Efex Pro 3.0 by Nik Software. We are doing the 15-day free trial of it to see if it will be our Christmas present to ourselves.

Iowa State CX Championships

That's right, this is a race report, but no, I was not in Iowa this weekend. Instead, my sister went out to give 'cross racing a try for the first time...and picked the state championship as her first race. Well, maybe she was "strongly encouraged" by her big sister to go find out how much fun 'cross racing is. She tried to tell me that she is going to school full-time in addition to working 12 hour shifts as a nurse's assistant and therefore hasn't been on her bike in a month. I told her that its only a 45 minute race and she doesn't have anything to lose so why not give it a go.

I'd actually forgotten that we'd discussed her doing this race until Saturday afternoon when Dad called me and said they were at the race venue getting ready for Kristen's race...in my head I'm thinking, oh crap! I didn't prep her at all...I mean, Kristen does know how to get herself ready for a race, she road races all the time...but a 'cross race is a little different...so much strategy, so many little details, so much suffering (maybe I'd skip that part)...so dad's on the phone telling me what the course is like and I ask if her tires are pretty soft. He says, no, we pumped them up nice and hard...NOOOO!!! Crap, go let air out now! But it was too late, Kristen was already on the starting line. They started and off she went.

She did pretty well and never killed herself on any turns on her too-hard tires. She felt bad a little bit because she got lapped, but so did I in my first few 'cross races, so no big deal. The bummer is that the field was so small - only 12 women total, all categories!

The post-race phone call was rather entertaining. For this race the officials raced them for 45 minutes, then two laps after that. Kristen, used to road races, sort of thought that meant everyone sort of sits in for 45 minutes and then attacks on the last 2 laps...she was not prepared for the instantaneous crazy pace right off the start. Oops, should have told her about that. And looking at the photo i guess I should have told her to take the water bottle cages off, too...but at least she was sporting a Bella bottle!

This week she'll be getting my old 'cross bike in the mail, so she'll be all ready to race JingleCross over Thanksgiving on a proper 'cross bike.

Overall, she had a blast and is excited to try it again!