Gawd, I suck, I mean beyond belief. If I get behind the wrong wheel in a race or ride it's game over. Why??? Freaking doctors can't figure out how to rid me of what I may or may not have without kicking the rest of my bodies ass. My hematocrit has been a steady 36%, just about 5 standard deviations from the norm... :< I still try racing, I went to Modesto last weekend, got caught out when some smucks got dropped and couldn't cross the gap, game over. So I spent 2 hours just dicking around periodically riding hard and integrating with various groups until officials popped up.
I only have one more treatment at UCSF, great...not so fast, I've been told I have a little over a month after this of possibly crappier blood values. I am hopeful by August I will be ready to actually race again. Sick of bringing a pellet gun to a bazooka fight.
Anyway today I tried the Spectrum ride, which I stunk at. I am not very aggressive in training rides so I sit near the back, and again am prone to being in the wrong place. I made it decently far, and actually up some positive gradients in the pack, but a few gaps opened due to crashes or weaker riders and I ended up languishing a little more than I'd like. So I took my own way home, unfortunately I got behind some "Fred's" which is bound to happen on a beautiful Saturday morning in NorCal. I go around and this lady in a neon yellow Fred jacket makes a snide remark about someone passing and not calling out "on your left" (after she was bitching about the Spectrum ride). WTF? These chumps are jabbering like parrots at 4mph on a steep grade sprawled all over the road. The last thing I want to do is distract them, freaking them out, and there's a bunch of chumps on the ground. So I flip her off, and she flips out. Now why should I respect anyone in a Yellow Fred Jacket? Well apparently she won RAAM 8000 years ago and is an expert cyclist or something, I got the proverbial "do you who she is?" from the dork with the Costner in American Flyers moustache riding with them. Screw her trying to lecture me, like I have to yell out on your left every 10 seconds (there are a lot of people riding on Saturdays)? Frick what about just holding your bloody line, I'm not going to chop anybody, I race in 150 person crits, I don't crash, and don't want to crash anybody out. The annoying thing is I can lecture people all I want but people in general are stupid, and will believe whatever they want to believe. So what's the point, might as well just flip them off and ruin their day, life's a bitch! Then they turned right blazing through a stop sign, WTF indeed.
I do have a plan to not suck as much. CLIMB. I've been avoiding the big climbs like the plague (cuz they REALLY hurt now), I went up Bohlmann Thursday and suffered horribly. But I realized even with a 20% O2 deficit I can atleast boost my pain tolerance. I want to try Leesville on July 3rd, I know if I can make it to the bottom of that climb with the group I'll be satisfied, and maybe not finish DFL. Another scan Tuesday, ugh. I sure love high doses of radiation :(
