Sunday, December 26, 2010

After Christmas Glow

Christmas has come and gone, we spent the day at home because Katie had to work at the hospital at 11. We are up in Monticello for the day to see Katie's family. The drive was uneventful, no cops, and really no traffic to speak of.
I had asked for a bike rack for Christmas but I never thought that I would actually get it as it was a gift that was approaching $300 and would never expect someone to do that. Not even my own folks. Well my Mother and Father-in laws are uber generous and purchased the rack that I wanted. It is a Softride, Dura 4 bike, bicycle rack with a hydraulic assist. This rack makes it possible to get into the rear hatch by bending away from the car while also keeping the bikes in a vertical position. That makes it nice that you don't have to worry about your bike hitting the ground when you tilt them from the car. I only hope is that the rack is as secure as it advertises and as people have said it is

We are not going to see my folks until next weekend. They are going to come down to St Louis and bring my younger brother Zac, his fiancĂ©e Jamie, and my baby nephew Will. This will be the first time that my brother Zac and Jamie have been to St Louis. Zac really is kind of a home body and doesn't like to go outside of Chicago. I am really excited for them to come though. I didn't really have that great of a relationship with my brothers as a kid and I have been trying to rectify that for the last 10 years. So the more I get to talk to my two brothers and see them, the better.
We are only a few days away from the new year. That has always signaled that time to really start laying down some serious miles on the bike. My ass is going to be hurting bad for the next few weeks since I am still waiting for my road bike. My TT bike has been fit to me really well but it still is not a great bike to be on for very long. I am going to try to work on more intense workouts while on it rather than the longer rides that I will do on the road bike. I hope that the work that I have been doing is going to pay off. I really have felt pretty sore and tired. I use the WKO+ software and it does a great job of keeping track of my riding but I don't think that it does as well with weight training. If I input those workouts the training stress doesn't seem as high as it should. So my TSS CTL and ATL are a little out of whack I think, but those numbers are all better for this new season than it was when I first started using the program.
The Cat 3 team has now gotten to 6 guys, we picked up a couple more last week. We are going to wait to let that info out till some stuff is taken care of with their current team. I think this is really going to be an exciting season. I also think that I will be the weakest rider on the team, but as long as I am able to add to the team in some way I will feel happy.
I have my home gymnastics meet in a couple weeks. It is called the Meet Me In St Louis Invite. It brings in over 1400 athletes over 2 days of competition in 3 gyms which have 2 set of equipment each, and one boys gym. It is really a big money maker for our parents organization, it offsets the cost of coaches traveling, eating, and working at competitions. Competitions are really pretty fun, and tiring. You work all day and then go out all night. Not really the best thing to do when I am trying to train for racing so I will have to watch myself a little more this year. This meet is the real start of our season and once we have that we have a meet every other week. I have also scheduled races once March comes around, so it will be a VERY busy spring. I can't wait for it all to get started.
 Check out these t-shirts that I made for the meet. I tried to do something that I have never seen at a meet before.
This is the image, and I guess you can put it on just about any color shirt. The original color I made the shirt with was red!

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