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.