Another summer has come and gone and fall is here. This means its Cyclocross season !!!
I have been looking forward to Cross season. I was hoping to be in top shape this year but as always things come up. I haven't ridden for about a month after coming off of the HAN 24 hr Solo race.
I took a week off to recover and for all the good that did I ended up with cold that lasted 2 weeks. Having just started on insulin the end of June this was the first time I was sick while on insulin. My sugar was pretty high for the two weeks and I found out this is normal in Diabetics and that you need to adjust insulin to compensate.
I was finally feeling ok a week ago but kept procrastinating and never did any riding.
I have been actually having some problems with sugar lows before I got sick and just switched to a new insulin on Friday. My sugar was pretty high again over the weekend and I am not sure how this effects my performance.
Needless to say I was a bit bummed out about going to the first race knowing that I would probably not preform that great from being sick, not riding , and switching to a new insulin, which I was told could take a week to stabilize.
My alarm was set for 5:50 and I was hoping to be on the road for 6:30 the latest. I had basically 1.5 hr drive to Calabogie for the first race and would just eat in the car. I had pretty much everything laid out the night before so I would not have to look for anything in the morning. I kept hitting the snooze and before I knew it it was 6:45. I was going to turn off the alarm and go back to bed but knowing that I would not do well meant I had no pressure and decided to just go and have fun and hopefully the race would pick my motivation back up to get back into training.
I arrived at the race about 35 minutes before the start and I knew I would probably not get to pre-ride the course. Turns out the start was a bit late and I managed to do most of the course for a warm up.
My old shoes are starting to come apart and I recently bought new shoes with new cleats. I can tell you one thing, Cross is not the place to be breaking in new cleats. On top of this after lap one my right cleat was loose and it was almost impossible to clip in. If I had any platform to stand on it would have not been that big of an issue but with only a slippery small metal pedal to support your foot made it impossible to be aggressive.
I like cross because my weakness of power gets helped out by my good technical skills along with my ability to clip back into the pedals really fast, normally ... so having the pedal problem made me ride slow in technical sections and I lost tons of time after every remount trying desperately to clip back in.
The good news is I did have fun and I have no where to go but up. Hoping to do a good week of training and be back in decent form for me.
Next week is the Madison race which is a fun two person team race alternating laps. Hoping to have Megan out for that but we will see how that goes :)
Cheers,
Paul
