and here we go

First real post in a while. Well, unlike my previous post alluded to, there was no great story of suffering to report.

I didn't get to Angel Fire until about 8:00 Friday night. I picked up my number, found a cozy place to park the car, ate my foot long Subway sandwich, and set up camp in the rear of the Subaru. Five Star I tell you.

I woke up in the morning tired from the weeks efforts. Absolutely felt it in my legs during the warm up, so I prepared my self mentally for a painful and long race. I guess you know where I'm going with this. After a delayed staging session, they finally blew the whistle or horn or whatever it was. It wasn't the smoothest of starts. There were 40+ guys going off on very lose terrain with baby heads trying to be the first one to a fairly steep right hand turn on to single track.

I think the extra road racing helped me out in that situation. I just bumped a couple of elbow and managed to stay upright. Then, the real race started. I just rode within myself and started passing people. A few minutes later, I found out that I had the ability to accelerate when needed.

The descent wasn't one that suited my strengths, but I held my own. I could tell that I hadn't been on the dirt too much lately.

Long story short, for the first time in several days my legs felt good. They didn't feel good before the race. They didn't feel good on the ride after the race, but for that 2 hours during the race, something clicked. I ended up with a much better placing than I had anticipated. Not too bad considering that I was convinced my coach was trying to kill me the last two weeks.

I found this picture of myself in the first mountain bike race of the season. Yep, I was super focused. Goofing off in a race is part of my focus.

So the puke post from a week a go was a reference to how I felt after that race. I won't go into the details, but sometimes I just feel like that after a hard race. Sometimes I feel like that hours after a hard race.

Well, this is a pretty dull post.

How about another list of music playing in the ear buds these days?
Animal Collective: Feels
Beirut: Gulag Orchestra
The Weakerthans: Reconstruction Site
The Mountain Goats: The Sunset Tree
Sunset Rubdown: Shut Up I'm Dreaming
The Black Keys: Culahoma
The Raconteurs: Broken Boy Soldiers
The 88: Over and Over

I'm almost afraid to admit that last one. I actually first heard of that band on a sitcom (by the way, I think the sitcom is a great format. I missed them during the "reality" show phase, but now they are enjoying a comeback. My current favorite: The Office, but I digress.). I thought it was some made up band for the show until I was perusing emusic.com (yes, very closely, this was one long emusic session) and came across them. I took a listen and in my opinion, it's pretty hard to not like good Power Pop. Pretty good Power Pop it is.

Well, I also hate to admit this, but I was drinking a cup of Starbucks (I know, just bitch slap me now) on the way to work and listening to their new CD. It put me in a pretty good mood. I can feel my cred eroding away as I type, but that's not even the worst of it. One of the tracks is the jingle for a Target commercial, and that commercial is on the boob tube all the time. There. I said it. My cred is gone, but you need some pretty good sell-out pop stuff every once and a while. It's an enjoyable disc (or set of digital files).

But of all the ones listed above, I think The Mountain Goats album is the one I like the most.