Nerves

Tomorrow I take a step back into bike racing. I have not competed in a bike race in almost 4 years. I had said that I would not get back into racing until I 1. had built the Casati frame and 2. was fit enough to ride away from a cat 5 field. Well.....neither of those are true right now but I am doing it anyway. I am tired of waiting and tomorrow I line up for a crit.


I am a little nervous. Ok to be honest I am pretty nervous. The crit is at 8am so from the time I get up until I start I won't have a ton of time to worry about it (hopefully).

Well since it is an early start I am keeping this short and heading to bed. Hopefully I will have good news to report tomorrow. At this point good news would be not getting completely dropped and being able to hang in the group with out any issues.

Here goes...

Up and down

A few weeks ago I had put together a great training plan and was ready to get serious about training for the season (Yeah I am a little late). Of course at that point my son got a nasty stomach bug. While we typically encourage sharing we are working on keeping somethings to ourselves. Specifically illness. We would like to be able to keep him from sharing any illness with us but he really likes to share. So both Nici and I ended up coming down with the stomach bug. I don't know if either Nici or I have been that sick in a couple of decades. It was BAD! It actually knocked us out for three days or so. I managed to make it to campus to teach but that was about it. While there was a lot less walking around the lecture hall I teach in and a lot more using the podium to stay upright class went pretty well.

The oddest thing about that week was that while we were all feeling so horrible I kept getting really good news. Had we not been sick it might have been one of the best weeks in a while. My IRB approval for my dissertation was approved and I was able to start collecting data full force (thanks to some great undergraduate RA's). I got some good news on the job front and Connor got over his illness pretty quickly.

It was a very odd week with the extreme positive and negative emotions but the positive certainly outweighed the negatives.

Now to get my data collected quickly and get back to training. My first race of the year is this weekend. WOW how did that get here so quickly????

Back to Racing

I have been wanting to get back to racing since the last race that I was in. Ok maybe not right after my last race but shortly after. I have not raced since May or June of 2007. My last race did not end well and since I am in grad school I knew that I could not afford a new frame if something happened to the one I have. Well about a year ago a very nice guy took that excuse away from me. Peter Erdoes gave me a frame that I have been trying to build up.

The build has been slow. To be fair it has pretty much stalled. But I really want to get back to racing. So I made a decision today to just do it. I have signed up for a race 3 weeks from today. YIKES! Yeah my training is probably 2 months behind schedule but in order to push myself to train at 5:30 am I needed the pressure of knowing that the opportunity to race was real.


While I am taking the risk that something happens to my Madone I have a plan in case it does. I will have to sell my Santa Cruz Superlight mountain bike so that I can a)repair my Madone and b)build the frame that Peter game me. I have been holding off on selling my mountain bike b/c I do really like riding it but I have not been on it for over a year now. Hopefully it won't come to this but I am prepared.

So now I just have to make sure I don't look like an idiot and my legs can actually keep me in the race for more than 10 minutes!

Hoops

So on a cycling related blog you would assume that anything entitled hoops probably has to do with wheels. While I do need a set of wheels to build up the frame I am still working on building...this post has nothing to do with wheels.

The hoops I am referring to are the important ones that you have to step through as a graduate student to earn your Ph.D.
They start far before you enter the program. Earn good grades, good GRE score, letters of recommendation, apply to school. Once you are in you have a whole new set of hoops to jump through. Take classes, do research, thesis proposal, thesis defense, written comprehensive exams, oral comprehensive exams, dissertation proposal, dissertation defense.

Well today I successfully proposed my dissertation so I only have one hoop left to jump through--dissertation defense.

Now on to the data collection and defense!

Remembering what matters

Often ours best plans simply don't work out. Missed rides or runs when we have a training plan, having to work late when we want to stop at 5 to relax and spend time doing something fun, ect. We all have had it happen and it can be very frustrating. When life gets in the way of my plans I tend to get very frustrated. Especially when I have been trying very hard to make all of the plans work out. Sometimes it can feel as if I will never be able to get all of the work done, spend time with my family, and ride. I can usually get two of the three in but not all three. Hence my continuing focus on getting the balance right.

But the last few weeks have reminded me of what is really important and no matter how discouraging it can be when things don't go according to plan I am very lucky. In the last few weeks several people close to me have lost someone close to them. My good friend lost his mother a week or so ago and my sister lost her dog after many amazing years. These losses have left me thinking about how lucky I am to have an amazing wife, son, sister, brother-in-law, parents, friends (2 and 4 legged). So when life gets crazy and you get frustrated trying to fit everything in take a moment to think about all of the people in your life that matter to you. Maybe a missed ride or run is not such a big thing.

2011 Goals

Ok so I have a pretty big list of goals for this year. Of course they are in several different areas of my life. While I do plan on going into more detail (basically so I am held accountable for each of them) later I want to get the gist of them down now.

Professional Goals:
-Collect dissertation data
-Defend dissertation
-Graduate
-Get a faculty position or post-doc
-Rewrite a number of articles and resubmit them to journals

Family:
-Spend more time with my wife and Connor
-Be the best dad and husband possible

Personal (non-family):
-Get back into racing shape
-Lose the weight I gained in the last 8 months (back down to 140lbs)
-Race ???


Ok so basically in order to accomplish all of these goals (this spring) I need to find the perfect balance in my life. Either that or stop sleeping and I am pretty sure that there is not enough caffeine in the world for that.

So more details later on how I will accomplish all of this and still enjoy life. Yes I know that some of these goals are a little vague and I will be making them more specific soon.

New Year - New Start

So it clearly has been a while since I last posted something here. The last seven months or so have been pretty crazy. Getting into a balance with family, work, and riding it seems that I can usually manage two of the three but not all three. Especially with trying to finish school and apply for a ton of faculty positions.

The last few weeks have been wonderful. A trip back to NC to see our family and travel with Connor for the first time was amazing. The only thing that did not go smoothly was the snow storm the day after Christmas. We had arranged to have Connor baptized the day after Christmas and the snow ended up closing everything in town. I guess it just gives us another reason to get back to NC soon!

I have been working on figuring out a way to get the balance in my life so that I can get my work done, graduate, find a faculty position, spend tons of time with my family, ride, and maybe even race. My plans are coming together in my head and once I put them down on paper then I will share them here!