Off the bike and onto a sub 2,000 Calorie diet

I love eating.  It may actually be the root cause of why I love cycling - when my calorie counter ticks away 2,000 calories or more burned on a single ride, it means that I get to eat 2,000 more calories than a normal person of my weight.  It does not mean (unfortunately!) that those calories can come from chocolate, ice cream, trips to the bakery, and chocolate covered jujubes (all personal vices).  But it does mean that when Drew goes back for post-ride seconds or thirds, I can join in the festivities.

I've also been very very fortunate, beyond some sciatic nerve pain in power-requiring race courses, a bit of hip jamming, and a couple painful road crashes, I have spent relatively little time convalescing from injury or sickness.  So I'll preface all this with an explanation - I do know how lucky I've been.

This blog post originally had a long explanation of what happened, what I'd been doing since, and a general tone of melancholy.  I'm pretty sure that never helped (or interested!) anyone, so instead I'll just mention that I've been going crazy off the bike due to a painful niggling in my knee that isn't serious, but enough to limit my ability to ride and subsequently limiting my caloric intake to that of a normal human.

I missed racing the first race of the year at the Hartland Dump in Victoria.  The one hometown mountain bike race of the year and I am on the sidelines.  I did offer to volunteer and showed up ready to work, but the guys of the Trek Store Victoria did a great job handling things on their own and it became more of a social hour than anything.

Drew did race, and suffered.  With his new job he's been spending lots of mornings, days, and evenings off the bike and away from home.  Beer league hockey has been the staple on his training plan and apparently that wasn't enough to minimize the pain from 4 laps of the dump.  To quote directly, "I just got bored of hurting that much."  He finished the day in 4th behind two full-time athletes and another talented weekend warrior.  The turnout for a cold and windy day was good with about 60-70 racers and a decent number of supporters.  Next stop on the island cup circuit will be the Powell River XC on March 20th - a preview of the BC Bike race course!

In other news, shortly after my knee started whining we got a huge (for Victoria) dump of snow....apparently the groundhog lied to us.  Photos appear above, around, and below.

And in other other news, my race bike is on its way and I'll have it next week - woot woot!  After having a mental battle with myself, I finally decided to go with the CXR 29er, once built it will be 22 pounds of carbon beauty!  It will be perfect for US XC Nationals in Sun Valley, Idaho and for the Test of Metal in Squamish, BC.  It will take me a week or two to gather all the parts together, but once there I will post photos! (Teaser snow photos of the demo bike we have above!)