I thought it time for another blog post, as the race season is well underway and I'm headed into my fifth race weekend with Ghost of Gravel this Sunday. Should be interesting as forecast calls for rain and the race is 118km of gravel! I'm super excited, I'm hoping it will be alot like this: SeanKelly4Ever!!
As I've gotten some more racing into the legs I've found the feeling of nervousness heading into races has kind of faded away. I can feel the race form starting to come into swing and now I'm actually stoked to be racing versus feeling some trepidation. Most recently I raced the kicking horse cup in Golden BC, which was a confidence boost as I was able to get on the podium in the road race and performed reasonably well with a 4th place finish in the hill climb and time trials. It was great to be racing with a couple other guys with Synergy. For about 3 glorious minutes we were team time trialing off the front but were soon shut down by Warren Muir on the Leadout Project.
This year I have been amazed with the level of competition in the elite mens field. Leadout Project made the road race interesting with viscous attacks happening pretty much right from the gun. I suspect their strategy regarding attacking is around the same as mine (also known as keep attacking until something sticks). Anchorman sums it up pretty well:
In addition, Stephan Becker, an exceptional rider who recently entered the race scene has been shaking things up by upgrading from cat 5 to cat 2 in around 2 months. I have secret hopes to convert him to joining my cycling team, Synergy Racing.
It was interesting to compare the power files from last year to this year, with only a 5-10W difference in normalized and average power! Quite amazing just how similar the two efforts from one year apart are, and how difficult personal improvement can be to realize after training hard for a few years. I think the same goes for realizing personal improvement in areas other than physical endeavors too. So often I find myself slipping into autopilot and doing things the same way as I've always done them. Habits can become so ingrained and to change takes a conscious effort and stepping outside of your comfort zone, which is terrifying! Continuing on this train of thought, I wonder how many of the things we do are that are even conscious efforts at all? Once the motor pattern becomes muscle memory it seems all it takes is for us to initiate the process and it just carries itself out. I think this is both good and bad as it stresses how important it is to learn how to do something right the first time! Perhaps excellence in life and athletic endeavors is about building effective "ruts" in the brain and just letting the process execute. Heck, I bet even our moods are at least partially self reinforcing habits too. So this means we're basically pre-programmed robots a pretty good chunk of the time.
In other news, two great thing things have happened recently, I bought my first vehicle, a red mini-cooper s, which is crazy fun to drive (pics upcoming), and met an awesome girl! (I'm now realizing now the two events may not be mutually exclusive.) Holly is a cross country skier and all round great human. We are "totally dating" so that's a thing!
