Stuck In First Gear

Usually by this point in any new year I have created an Events tab to show you where I think I will be riding and racing. Not so in 2019. My special events calendar has been slow to evolve. I haven’t said much about my plans other than that I intend to return to mountain biking after sitting out last year. And I will, but it’s increasingly unlikely that I will do any racing in the first half of season.

This year’s WEMS and WORS schedules don’t work well for me. Most of the WEMS events are too far away, demanding long drives on Saturday mornings. That’s bad enough by itself, but it’s even worse when you consider I work overnight on Fridays. Running on Sundays, WORS races fit better with my work schedule, but I’m still not willing to travel far. That means I couldn’t hope to compete for a series title, and without such an incentive I am less likely to participate even in nearby races like Englewood, CamRock, and Minooka.

My mountain bike racing season may prove to be all about the WEMS Championships at New Fane on September 7. If that’s true, then the most sensible plan is to train at New Fane almost to the exclusion of all other courses. From a competitive standpoint, that has been a successful strategy in the past. There are other factors arguing in its favor this year, the most compelling of which is, simply, I am very busy with things outside of cycling.

The situation will get worse before it gets better. My oldest child will graduate from college in May. My youngest child will graduate from high school in June and then begin college in the fall. Those will be proud moments for me, but you can easily imagine the demands that they will make on my time, my money, and my energy. There’s also a huge list of home improvements that must be addressed this year. I don’t know how I will do it all, but I don’t have any choice, and my cycling season will suffer for it.

So, don’t expect much from me in the first half of 2019. I am way behind last year’s pace and it could be June before I look anything like the cyclist I should be. My training is still very hit-or-miss, rising and falling with our erratic weather. Trails are still too wet to ride, but as the weather improves I will get into a quiet training schedule that I think will look like this:

MO - Endurance ride (road)
TU - Cyclocross practice @ Royal Oaks
WE – Flex Day: either rest or make up for a rainout
TH - Mountain bike practice @ New Fane
FR - Endurance ride (Eisenbahn State Trail)
SA - Mountain bike practice @ New Fane
SU - Endurance ride (road or rec trail)

Most of that will be solo or in the company of just 1 or 2 friends, even the cyclocross practices, which normally I would confine to August and September. This year I intend to hit Royal Oaks Park every week for short-but-hard workouts of the sort I don’t do often enough. Hopefully that will be a fun way to force myself to do intervals. Five months of that schedule should deliver me to the end of summer in good shape for the WEMS Championships and for the cyclocross season, which I expect to be much fuller than last year’s. The family stuff, the house stuff … those things should settle down before Labor Day.

There’s just so much work to do between now and then.