102F

Whoa, it's been a couple of rough weeks here...

Two weekends ago I did the bike racing thing on Saturday at the Barrio Logan Grand Prix in San Diego. Pretty cool race that I have done a few times - back in 2000?-ish I did the Pro 1,2 race and was pack fodder - a few years ago I did the 3's race (yeah, checked in the ego points and traded in my cat1 license for the less demoralizing experience of racing with the 3's...) and the M30+ race - I can't even remember what I did in those races. heh, it's true, you're only as good as your last race!

Anyway, this year, Barrio Logan was the M30+ state crit championship race. A teammate of mine was in the break that was off the front for the whole race (until Karl Bordine and a Time racing guy bridged with a handful of laps to go. Bordine wound up taking the jersey. I covered a move midway through (sorry Brett and Allen from Schroeder for not taking any pulls, just lookin' for a free ride up to the break! ;-)

Here's a nifty plot from this effort using the "chung method"

Basically, I went hard covering that move and it took me a bit to recover... meanwhile, Karl went up the road.

Good day for the Jamba Juice guys though, as Brian wound up taking fourth on the day!

It was picture day for us as well:

OK, so what the heck is the 102F thing all about? Well, I was all ready to ride the bike on Sunday for the San Luis Rey Road Race. In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have even pinned the number on. I live about 15 minutes by bike from the start of this sucker, and on the ride up there the SRM said 102F.

I kind of woke up with a bit of a sore throat, but decided to pedal a bit just 'cause... Well, I bagged it after a lap (got dropped fer no good reason!) - the next day I woke up in the middle of the night with a 102F fever. D'oh.

This pleasant experience of having a fever of 102-103 lasted for around 7 days - it got so bad I even drug my lame ass to the doctor for the first time in I can't remember when! He gave me some antibiotics (not a real big fan of this...) and told me to take some ibuprofen. sweet.

So, on top of the whole illness thing, I also came down with some weird bilateral leg pain that caused a general ache that woke me up in the middle of the night on several occassions. Not pleasant - and wound up with me taking another trip to the doc (who probably thinks I'm a hypochondriac now!).

Well, the result of this whole health fiasco was that I wound up riding the bike very little over the past two weeks and took a pass on the SoCal State TT this past Saturday. So, just how long is it going to take to get the 20MP back to where it was before this forced off the bike period?

Well, it looks like four rides where I tried to go hard and I'm pretty close to where I was three weeks ago. Saturday I gave it a go up my ~17 minute field test hill: 288watts. Sunday I did the same ride and managed 297W. Took monday off completely. Tuesday I did my lunch hour Vo2's (I could only manage 10W below what I normally do them at). Today (Wed), I ripped it up the same hill I did Sat/Sun and managed 307W. Things seem to be coming back online power wise - my 20MP just prior to getting sick was in the 305-310W range.

Full slate of racing this weekend lined up - I'll be out at the Dana Point Grand Prix doing the 3's and the M35+ stuff, then on Sunday I'll toe the line in the M35+ and the P 1,2,3 race in Woodland Hills. We'll see how I feel after riding around in circles for 5 hours this weekend!

Have fun out there!