Part I-Playing Bike RacerThings this weekend went from my normal amount of organized chaos to just plain crazy. I didn't really race this weekend, but did race training. In my opinion this is harder because there just isn't the same motivation to push yourself. It began Saturday with my race training ride. My hopes were that the rain would stop and the roads would dry up so that I wouldn't be trying to push my 25 lb rain bike up hills at race pace. Well, this is the Northwest, where everything is covered in green squishy stuff because it is always wet, even when it's not raining. It's like living on a sponge that never dries out. The rain did stop, but the dampness remained, mostly in part to fog that was covering most of the area Saturday morning. The roads were wet, but it was going to be 60 degrees later in the day. So, I decided to take the race bike out and secretly hoped I would only be riding on wet roads for an hour or so. Well that didn't happen either. We rode to Washougal (where we are building our house) where there are some good climbs and I think it rains the most. After that we headed up to Hockinson to hit the rollers. It was a great ride and in the end my bike looked like this:
It kind of looks like a post Paris-Roubaix bike. I know it's really no big deal, I just had to spend some quality outdoor time cleaning it when I got home. It was 60 degrees, I was happy to be outside. I actually enjoy cleaning my bike, more than I enjoy cleaning my house. Probably because I go have fun on my bike while getting it dirty, my house just gets dirty no matter what.
I really thought that my team kit was going to become my official mtn. biking only team kit. Who wears white in the Northwest in the winter? I know it's a fashion faux pas to wear white after Labor Day, maybe I should heed that rule.
Amazingly, it all came out. I really love the new kit, especially the all white shorts we have for summer. Maybe by July it will dry out enough that I can actually wear them.
The rain came back Saturday night and for some reason I decided to be a heathen and go ride Sunday (gasp) morning. I don't usually do this but our church is at 1:00 p.m., I had my lesson prepared to teach to the Young Women's group, it was a holiday weekend and I wanted to do a couple of hard training days back to back to see how my legs felt. Is that enough justification? I figured that I would for sure get hit by a car or ride into a ditch for breaking the Sabbath, but I got lucky. The weather was also pretty decent. It wasn't the usual drizzle for days on end rain we have, but smaller storms that moved through. It think we only rode in 20 minutes of rain during our 3 hour ride. My legs were pretty shot since I really did everything wrong when I got home from my hard ride on Saturday (not eating immediately, stretching and icing down my knee). I was still able to push it pretty hard. Tauscher and I rode up to Hockinson and pushed it on the rollers. When we hit Battle Ground we backed of and spun home allowing ourselves an hour of recovery riding from the past two days efforts.
Suprisingly my lesson at church went great and by the time I got home at 4:30 I was exhausted. Needless to say, I have this habit of not doing things that are logical to most people. You would think that after two hard training days I might actually go to bed early on Sunday night and get some much needed rest. Well, not me. I stayed up to watch Desparate Housewives at 9:00 and then my thought process went something like this. "I am getting up at 7:00 to meet Schauer and Tauscher for a nice long endurance ride. If I go to bed at midnight I can get 7 hours of sleep, good enough." So I proceeded to waste a couple of hours in front of the TV while I painted my fingernails and toenails bright pink. Don't ask why I did this, I never do this so I have no clue. I finally made my way to bed around 12:20, fine with me. I fell asleep quickly, until my rude awakening at 3:20 a.m..
Part II-Playing Rescue Hero(Lander's terminology)
At 3:20 a.m. my cell phone and home phone simultaneously started ringing. It can be only one thing, there is a rescue. I literally fall out of bed and crawl downstairs to call into the PMR voicemail to get more information, I had to listen to it twice because I spaced off the first time. I left my message saying I would be there and then wondered how I was going to get my gear together and be up to T-line lodge at 5:30 a.m.. It takes 1.5 hours to get to T-line from my house and my gear was strewn all over the house and the garage. It took me a good 10 minutes to wake up to the point that I felt competent that I could actually pack all the gear I needed and then some, thank goodness for checklists. I was out the door at 4:20, a little later than planned, but I did my best and luckily made it up there with all the pertinent gear.
I got to T-line at 6:00 just in time for the morning debrief and planning session. I tried to situate myself as far away from the TV cameras as possible, but that was unsuccessful and I ended up in some pictures that made their way to all the major news networks in the U.S.. GREAT!!! Luckily my bright green hat (I need a more incognito hat) was covering the mess my hair was in. Not that I cared, but I spend so much time looking like a dork it would be nice to limit these kind of situations as much as possible. Our team was responsible for hauling gear into the field. I like that job, I usually have a good time because there is a lot of waiting around so we get to chat with eachother and hang out.
We were out the door at 7:00 a.m. hauling our sled full of gear. There were six on our team Steve, Iain, Todd, Keith, Tom and myself. We didn't have very far to hike to get to the rim of White River Canyon so we were there in no time. We did a compression test to check the avy danger, it would be sketchy that day. We figured we would be stationed there for a while so we dug a huge snow cave. This accomplished two things, we had something to do that kept us warm and we had a place to get out of the snow and wind. It was alot of fun and I can honestly say that the longer we hung out in the snow cave, the goofier we got. There were many joking comments about how my pink fingernails didn't match my red jacket, it was ridiculous. Did we make sure to punch enough air holes? I don't know, maybe I have a few less brain cells than before. This mission had a happy ending, I was pleased. A full report will be posted here that is a little more detailed than what you saw on the news.
All I can say is that it was a great holiday weekend. We had some fun time with the family interspersed between all the adventure. What more could I ask for, I was totally beat when I went to work Tuesday morning.
