Friday, April 20, 2007

So-Pro Sick

Being a pro bike racer has often struck me as suspiciously similar to being sick. The optimal lifestyle is basically to train, eat, stretch/massage, then sleep or lie in bed with your feet up. I've discovered this is probably not my optimal lifestyle for bike racing, since I tend to get bored, no matter how many good movies I watch or books I read. Up to that ever-elusive tipping point, adding in other endeavors such as school and teaching actually makes me race a bike faster, and lends a useful sustainability to the endeavor. I have bouts of wishing I lived in California or Colorado, of wishing I were just going for it, but I have it pretty good: a great program at school, a team I am very fond of that is giving me a ton of racing opportunities and whose management is eager to work with my schedule, and a beloved cycling community here in New Haven. But the consequence of this schedule is that I am not always so pro in my approach to recovery, in fact I am often ridiculously on-the-go, and it just caught up with me - on Monday I got walloped with the flu/cold something. Out of dire necessity, I have had to drastically scale back everything this week. If I had scaled back a bit more in past weeks I probably would not have gotten sick and lost a whole week of training. Ay. At this point all I can do is be patient.

3 comments:

PoorDumbBastard said...

Every now and then, one has to sit back, relax and watch the Simpsons and not use the body or brain.

Anna Milkowski said...

Please give me this reminder more often, thanks. This might be today for me.

Rebecca said...

Hope you feel better soon! Try lying around and watching "Law and Order". ;-)