Once Upon a Time in North Carolina

Reader, Friend, and Fundraising support Derek has informed me it has been a long time since I blogged, and he's right. I had no idea it has been 8 days. That's the longest break I've ever taken, and let me tell you it was not intentional.

Last week after the race I settled in at my parents place for the week while Rach headed back home to work. I spent the week golfing with dad, hanging out with mom and sis, and goofing around with my nieces and my "temporary sister" Trine, the exchange student stay with them for the year. We celebrated my parents 40th wedding anniversary and I mowed my grandmothers grass. The fact that I did it wrong, again, for about the 24th year in a row is not surprising. Some things I don't think we ever get right, and there's a lesson in that too.

I did very little in the way of physical activity other than the golf, which I played poorly but surprisingly well considering the effort at Cedar Point, and my back has mostly recovered. I even rode my dads cruiser bike the 1 1/2 miles each way to my Grandmothers house in order to cut the grass, which was harder than I thought it would be; it reminded me how much I like gears on bicycles.

When I got back to North Carolina, it was time to get down to business. I started work at the new job for a health care company. This health care company not only lets me work 100% from home, but happens to sponsor a couple of pro continental bike racing teams through it's various subsidiaries (of note, none of my opinions ever represent these companies. In fact, my opinions barely represent me). Of course, I am now telling people that I am "co-workers" with professional cyclists, which is both fun and pretty much totally false. A guy can dream right?

We're still unpacking and cleaning, and we're a long way from done, but the kitchen looks great, the bedroom is getting there, and a small corner of the front room where my office is looks pretty nice. Having a house and yard is amazing, even if we're only renting. We're even going to throw a Halloween party, which will be interesting considering how few people we know here. In the meantime we're having problems with a broken pipe from our water well. Thank goodness for an awesome landlord.

I got in my first hard ride today on the MTB; papers I needed to turn in today in order to not get automatically terminated were left in the car last night which Rach had at work, so I had to ride down there and get them to bring back to fax. It turns out they did get them went I sent them Tuesday, so if nothing else at least I got in a nice hard 7 mile slightly hilly ride at max pace on my MTB. Max pace is not what I hope it will be in 2 weeks. I'm getting out tomorrow morning for a run before I have to come back to the house/office for a full day of watching orientation CBT's. Probably going for a run on lunch. When I can take a break in the mid afternoon I'm putting together my short training schedule for Anderson

I'm still fighting the cold I had going into Cedar Point, and it actually worsened substantially last week as my body recovered from the race. Im feeling better today and I'm wondering if this afternoons hard ride was part of that or if it's just the pseudoephedrine I took earlier. Uh oh, gotta be careful to be off the cold meds by the end of next week. Don't want USADA after me. Oh wait, they're gonna be too busy with a certain former pro cyclist who is going back to triathlon this weekend.

Oh, and I still need to register for Rev 3 Anderson in the next day or two. I'm doing the Olympic and volunteering for the 1/2 Iron once I get done with the race and quickly clean up. Just hoping I finish the Olympic before the pros finish the 1/2.