Cookies

Not so long ago I started riding my bike. I was bad at it, but I really loved it. I read a lot of magazines and books so I could learn "how to ride and race". One thing that stuck with me was to use all of my senses when I'm racing. So last night at cross practice I used what sounds clues my damaged ear drums could pick up on and make my race/training efforts work off of that. We do two sessions of 5x hot laps then a bunch of sprints. I took off hard, and wanted to get up to speed quick and feel some pain. I knew someone was on my wheel and was marking me, I could tell they were faster than me, all this from listening.

Its was Valentin Scherz from the Swiss national team racin, the guy on the right. That's JK on the left, he's pretty fast too. Valentin toyed with me and in return I tried to challenge him in the corners a bit. He'd let me gap and close hard and I'd try to listen to him coming up so I could accelerate at the last seconds to jump and close the door to the better line in the corners. Nothing to do with hearing but he was really smooth over the barriers and would come from behind me and be a couple of seconds in front of me by the time he got his first pedal stroke on the remount. He rode with smarts, and didn't need to flash his speed at all. I tried to hide my gasping for air when he was in ear shot, and sucked it in on the downhills and the noisy corners.

So today I ate cookies, really good local Swedish bakery cookies. Yep, not swiss.

good, good cookies.

Today I went back to Belmont to ride the trails, and I finished it up by pedaling up to the practice area to exam the lines. Funny thing, I think I must of rerun the laps a dozen times in my head while I was lying in bed waiting to fall asleep last night. What did I discovery, this...ride on..dlowe.