residual self-image update

Started the weekend at the track Friday night. Only two women showed up on accont of the holidy no doubt, so we had the choice of either doing 3 sprint matches, best two of three wins or riding with the novice men. My opponent and I chose to sprint. I wasn’t looking forward to it. Not my favorite. I don’t fancy myself a sprinter really. But then again, I have been winning most of the races I’ve done at the track this year, so maybe I need to update my self image to reflect reality. Kristin was looking particularly threatening in her shiny new black Ironclad kit. On the first round I barely nipped her at the line for the win. Classic photo finish: I got it by maybe a tire width. On the next round I led out and played a little cat and mouse for two laps then wound it up and hammered it home for the second win. Nerve wracking! I prefer chasing to leading. Steve asked if we wanted to race our third round, even though I’d won the omnium at that point. We did, and this time it looked like Kristin meant serious business. She lead us off the rail pedaling hard and fast… I was tired (she was counting on that I’m sure) and having trouble just hanging on to her wheel heading into our final lap. I decided to make a play going uptrack to get maximum speed coming down off the bank, and that did it. I catapulted ahead, dropped down into the sprinter’s lane ahead of her to snatch the last sprint too! It was definitely a sweet way to finish the season. I don’t think it was because I was stronger and faster than Kristin, but that I raced smart (finally!). I just hope to not get upgraded too soon before I’m ready to mix it up with the big girls.

Saturday saw me heading up to Mt Hood for a dirt ride with 6 friends up around Surveyor’s Ridge. 15 mile was new to me, and had I known what a bitch it would be I would have voted differently. I didn’t bonk like the previous week, but it was a rather substantial amount of climbing on legs that were tired and achy. My glutes and adductors were so sore from sprinting the night before. I ended up pushing my bike uphill… a lot. It was definitely on the epic side. We rode for about 4 1/2 hours total. Chris took pics so I hope to have something to post soon. While 15 mile kicked my nicely-healed-up-but-still-slightly-scarred ass, 8 mile was a sweet reward…descending on sweet, fast, flowy singletrack through dense forest. Yummy. I could do that all day. If only the climbing part wasn’t such a bitch.

Finally got my Super Relax kit last week… the one I ordered seems like 14 years ago. I was psyched to wear it finally. I went in to the studio to teach a class right before a ride on Friday and realized I forgot my yoga clothing so I ended up teaching like this:

Someone snickered at me when I walked in to start the class, so without missing a beat I said, “Didn’t you know, it’s International Mexican Wrestling Day? I forgot my mask at home.”

Looks like I have three residual self-images that need updating:

1) Apparently I am a sprinter
2) Apparently I can race smart
2) Apparently I am also a mountain biker

Sort of. Today I think I just need to take a nice, long nap though.

..if bumming was a super power…

Okay that strip has nothing to do with anything except it pretty much sums up how I feel about not doing the Diamond Lake XC race tomorrow. Something came up with work. Don’t wanna talk about it. I’m way bummed. Beyond bummed. I am so bummed that if bumming was a super power, I’d be omnipotent right now.

But looking on the bright side, I get to race at the velodrome tonight, which I wouldn’t have otherwise, so it’s like a bonus night at the track! Maybe I’ll bring out the “dress wheels”…

Bonk Bonk on the Head: On Finding Inner Peace

Feeling like it might be time for a change of paradigm soon. This blog was an experiment, really, to see how loose I could be, how playful I could get with it. Turns out not so much. I’m more passionate and playful than outright silly and transmuting the one into the other has been interesting but not really doing much for me. I might need to go back to “being serious” for awhile. If I do this bike tour idea that’s been brewing, with the intention of writing about it I’ll need to find that perfect balance of playful and serious. In the meantime, I feel like someone has bonkbonked me on the head. I must be (in part) the ending of the summer that gets me down. I am excited about the XC race and riding this weekend and not much else. Sad. I gotta get a new hobby or something. Any suggestions? Extreme fishing maybe? No… Nothing smelly. Volcano hiking? Turns out I have been walking around barefoot so much all these years of yoga that when I hike more than abotu 1/2 mile in shoes I get shinsplints. Sucks. … Perhaps a cerebral art: Soduku. Or I could try (yet another) poetry workshop. Ooh… I know! I could start writing mad libs again…. Yes! That’s it. Back to silly we are! (Didn’t take long did it?)

But I digress…
Ah but this is what sparked this line of thought... In working on future yoga workshops focusing on mental health I find myself both personally and professionally struggling with the lack of tolerance in our society for sadness, grief, melancholy and other human emotions. MY own mentor and teacher and I have been discussing this at length lately. The contemporary obsession with finding “happiness” rather than a calm and appreciative acceptance of ALL of our rich emotional topography leaves me feeling a bit discouraged, though I know from my own direct experience as well as working with others therapeutically, that when melancholy or grief or loneliness are not rejected, but rather held and felt, a different KIND of happiness is allowed to emerge.

Call it inner peace. It’s not a happy happy joy joy thing dependent on having the right circumstances, toys or people in ones’ life. It points back to radical self-acceptance of every single nuance of who we are, including the parts of ourselves we’d most like to avoid or get rid of. We need neither surgical excision of our darker sides, nor anesthetising of any part of our emotional composition, but simply a gentle awareness… This is not who we are, but merely a part of us in the moment, and that this too, really, shall pass.

Maybe writing Mad Libs is a bit off. Clearly my mission is more about “Sad Libs”… But instead of having people filling in the blanks to completion, I’d ask them to leave them blank, to lean in to those blank spots, into the less-than-shiny places, and just accept it all. The Tibetans have a saying: Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Quantum physics? Totally! But also an interesting meditation about simply seeing the door to happiness lies sometimes in just being with our fears, our hurts and our (perceived) failures. Happiness comes and goes, and it always will. Finding inner peace seems a much deeper challenge, but the reward is commensurate.

Good luck with that, should you choose to accept your mission.

I’m going to sit here now and watch my blog stats start to go backwards, kinda like me attempting Lolo Pass. I know people just like the fun stuff and ass shots. *sigh* Fine. Whatever. See you on the silly side again.

superbonk bonk: plains of abraham ride

Having problems integrating flickr photos with the wordpress interface. But here’s a little linky to more pics to tickle your eyeballs.

For me the ride started off with a major bonk. Actually it was beyond bonk. I’ve never had so much go wrong with my body all at once. Heart rate was off pegged at 180 most of the first 8 miles or so. I could feel my eyeballs pulsing in my skull. I was nauseas, overheated and felt about as mentally sharp as a tennis ball (kinda fuzzy and sorta yellow-greenish). Granted it was all uphill, but I simply wasn’t rested enough from racing the night before. I was hungry, breakfast had worn off long before we hit the trail, but I ate a fig bar and part of a little builder’s bar, but my stomach was very unhappy and I couldn’t keep the stuff down. I was more miserable than I can honestly say I have ever been on a bike ride…I could barely even see straight. I could tell there was some concern for me, and rightly so. I was fearful for my safety honestly. I walked a lot of that climb but even so I found mysel wondering: If I make it up to the top will I recover enough to ride down safely or will I be too out of it, tense and shaky? Another apple, a gel, several pauses where if the flies hadn’t been horrible I would have simply taken a nap but had to keep soldiering on so as not to concern the others. I finally made it to where the trail leveled off. Who know how long they were waiting for me. 1/2 hour or more maybe? I have no idea. I was completely out of my mind. Another gel and a handful of ripe huckleberries and I was magic all over again. Go figure. It was nothing short of a miracle. From superbonk bonk to super relaxed and rad!

I guess it happens to everyone eventually, and it was my day for the Superbonk bonk. Once we got to the plains we didn’t have much time left but I found my legs and even managed to chick Nick Gibson on the flats! (Well, for about 2 seconds, okay.) Glad I survived and looking forward to the next time… The best part was the dip in the alpine snow melt pond at the end… Full body immersion.

MAGIC!

not quite perfection, but… perfect, nonetheless

What an amazing weekend of bike riding. Kicked it off with that little track race which was fun and awesome. Followed it up yesterday with a trip to Mt St Helens to ride the Plains of Abraham trail. I’ll be posting more on that later. I will just say it was a very difficult ride to do after racing the night before. And then today I opted out of the Kermesse in favor of the Portland Century with a small Bike Vigilante posse.

The day started at 6am. I haven’t downloaded the garmin data yet but I know ride time was 6 hours 50 minutes, and I’m guestimating we did about 3700 feet of climbing. For me that is an EPIC amount of climbing, because… You know. I don’t climb. Had I seen the elevation profile before I signed up, I wouldn’t have signed up. And the climbing happened all in intense short spurts of relentless hills up around the Bull Run watershed area. I’m glad I did because while I’m spent now and it HURT sometimes (Janky was most displeased with me at times) I rode pretty consistently. I even had energy at the end for a bit of a sprint finish… uphill. I guess I might actually be stronger than I give myself credit for sometimes. It’s still hard to accept that I’m just not where I was before my accident, and may never be, but even so I’m not doing so badly. Hey man… I’m riding bikes! How sweet is that?!

The ticket was spendy … $80 for a century. I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much for a ride. But the rest areas were very well stocked. We had pound cake with whipped cream and berries in the morning, ham, cheese and salami sandwiches at lunch, and dinner at the end of ride was grilled salmon, pasta salad, a mixed green salad, yummy grilled asparagus and mmm…beer. They even sent us all home with beer.

I haven’t done a “fun ride” like that in a few years. I am glad I did. The company was awesome (b-boy James, Joel and Julio from Yakima) and even though James sandbags himself on his “slow” rides (meaning James’ slow is anything but), it was a pretty good pace–challenging at times, relaxed at others. I felt like the longer we rode the stronger I got until about mile 80 and then it was time to jst relax a bit. I should have more pics on my flickr page soon from the weekend’s events. Broke my camera this weekend, so I am at the mercy of others for pics. The iPhone just doesn’t cut it, you know?

Think it’s time for a few rest days… Next weekend: Diamond Lake for my first ever XC race!

winning ain’t everything but it doesn’t suck

I’M SAD! I DID WHAT WAS PROBABLY my last track race of the year tonight. Getting to the velodrome was a nightmare of traffic snarls and I only got a 20 minute warm-up. Not good! I was feeling pumped from the adrenaline of trying to make it there on time, but kind of flat, physically. Our first event was the Alpenrose mile. I worked too much, ramped up the speed too soon, got smoked on lap 5 and got third. Janky was Not Happy. Next up was a 10-lap tempo race, where every lap is worth 2 points to first place and 1 point to second. I came in third overall. It was a tough race, to be sure. The top three of us were a pretty even match I think, and I felt worked, hacking lungs (only two weeks off since I was booby trapped at Waldo Lake) but Janky felt a bit happier, looser, less pained/strained. The last event was the unknown mile. Not my favorite track event. But I played it smart, controlled the pace a bit the first few laps, stayed near the front but refused to do the work, and was in a good position when the bell rang. I put my head down and hammered, committed myself to a single purpose, and rode away from the group, putting a significant gap on the competition. I almost want to say I “decided” to win. It really was as if the “win switch” was flipped and where I’d been ambivalent about the other events I was pretty focused on taking this one. (Side note: I wonder if the “win switch” and the “fuckit button” are related?) Fortunately my body concurred. Janky cooperated, but I do think it was a mental win more than anything.

Yakiboy James B. took these fine photos, when he was “recovering” from his own racing. I put recovering in quotations because when he was rolling off the track after a tough race he was barely even breathing hard. Me, I do a 6-lap race and I sound like the intro to Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France”!
Man, that is still a great tune. Classic. Timeless. Kinda like… bike racing.

Below: Game face, bitches!

and now…a few words about the olympics

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

This from a friend who has more time on his hands than I do:

The best humor is often completely accidental——-

Here are the top nine comments made to date by NBC sports commentators during the 2008 Summer Olympics: (Not confirmed on Snopes, but who cares…)

1. Weightlifting commentator: “This is Gregoriava from Bulgaria. I saw her snatch this morning during her warm up and it was amazing.”
2. Dressage commentator: “This is really a lovely horse and I speak from personal experience since I once mounted her mother.”
3. Paul Hamm, Gymnast: “I owe a lot to my parents, especially my mother and father.”
4. Boxing Analyst: “Sure there have been injuries, and even some deaths in boxing, but none of them really that serious.”
5. Softball announcer: “If history repeats itself, I should think we can expect the same thing again.” (shades of yogi berra)
6. Basketball analyst: “He dribbles a lot and the opposition doesn’t like it. In fact you can see it all over their faces.”
7. At the rowing medal ceremony: “Ah, isn’t that nice, the wife of the IOC president is hugging the cox of the British crew.”
8. Soccer commentator: “Julian Dicks is everywhere. It’s like they’ve got eleven Dicks on the field.”
9. Tennis commentator: “One of the reasons Andy is playing so well is that, before the final round, his wife takes out his balls and kisses them… Oh my God, what have I just said?”

Can’t wait to hear Number 10…