The Worm has begun turning

So I've been very non-committal as it relates to racing my bike this season. With my bad luck over the last year I just haven't gotten my body back in shape enough to handle racing, both mentally and physically. I trained pretty hard in April, but then let things slide in May. I kept riding the bike, but didn't have any structure and certainly didn't ride hard at all. Somewhere along the way my motivation faded too.

I stuck my butt in my whitewater kayak more instead. Which is great - I love paddling and I'm gonna keep doing it quite often as long as my body allows it. Seems my lower back at my "advanced" age doesn't really like the kayaking though. Even with all the strength/core work, yoga, biking, stretching, and prescription medicine I still have to deal with moderate to advanced pain everyday. Oh well, welcome to getting old - won't stop me, might slow me down a little, but not much.

I have finally gotten the itch to get back to racing, which means back to training as well. This is great news as the training is what keeps me managing my weight. When I'm training, I'm also watching what I eat. The added exercise helps too, but I've learned that it's 80% diet. Heck, in May I decided that I wasn't going to worry about what I would eat - 8 pounds later here I am. So the long and short of my return to racing is this: I have decided to race at the Tree Shaker race in 3 weeks. It's a four hour race, and I'll probably do between 36-45 miles on my mountain bike depending on how fast I'm going. My guess is 36 miles as I'm just not gonna be in top shape in only 3 weeks from now. In this race you do as many 9 mile laps on a fairly technical course as you can in 4 hours. At least it's on a course that I ride all the time - I know every single root, rock, and line around that course. You can check out the race flyer here:
http://www.charlottemtnbike.com/12Hour/TreeShaker2012.pdf

So we'll see how it goes. I don't expect to be on any podiums at this race, but I gotta start somehwere. My hope is that by the Fall this year I'll be in good shape and flying - I can worry about podium finishes then.