Out and About at DCCX

It's always about me. But first a word about my teammates and some friends.

• Andrew - Balls Deep! Andrew is killing it.
• Peter - ought to quit training more often. He looked smooth out there. Like it was fun or something.
• Kevin - WTF? Strong performance. Rob, Mike and Dave too. Dan... well, we can't match the bling factor. And no cheap Johnny-come-lately crap either. Is there an award for good taste in gear?
  
• Scott T. - Nothing to see here. Just steady Top 10s in a class that today had 115 riders.
• Jon Seibold - as we say on Family Bikes shop rides, "it's because he's Jonathan Seibold, bitch!" Yet another strong race.
• Micah - when a dude's hands are shaking an hour later, you know he worked it.
• Lindsey - nothing to see here. Just a podium in women's elite.
• Meg - killed the monkey. Takes some courage to do that.
• Steve R - flatted in the early race, decided to drink as many beers as possible on the new tire. Then raced pretty strong in the elites. Buzzed. My idol.
• Trevor - crashed. I think I rode over a chunk of his kneecap on the tarmac. It made my wheel hop for a while. Then he came back, passed me and crushed me. Ford tough. If a Ford would run after being crashed hard.
  
• Chicken - took a sweet beer handup, at high speed. Downed it. Barely spilled a drop. Class.
  

I love my teammates and my friends. They are a source of endless amusement and pleasure, and there were just too many standout performances (and funny things) to even mention today. DCCX was a great event, as it's been each of the past two years, and I can't say enough good things about it. Suffice to say, it's an event you put on your calendar in red ink the day the MABRACross schedule is announced.

As for me...

Well, I'm not lovin' on myself a whole lot right now. I don't know where I finished exactly - the results show me as a DNF but there are a bunch of guys I *know* for a fact mechanicaled out who definitely DNF'ed and at least one guy I lapped are shown as ahead of me, but I'm thinking 79th or so is where I landed based on subtracting the guys who I know were behind or DNF, and counting back from the last known guys who passed me.

Scoring issues aside (scoring issues that are understandable given the sizes of Sunday's fields), the bottom line is I suck ass and this is starting to cause me some distress.

I'm a bit thinner than last year - not much, but spending 4 of the first 7 months of the year sidelined with the bummer foot will do that, so I'll settle for "a bit" and the weight loss glide path I'm on, which has me moving in the right direction at a slower rate than in the pre-season but still moving in the right direction. I'm also quite a bit stronger than last year, maybe 7-8% at threshold. My bike handling is something like 100% better. So I should be kicking ass, right?

You'd think so but my results are going further and further into the shitter.

It seems like I've discovered some new method of traveling between dimensions to go slower even though all indicators point to "faster." It's like if Kirk told Scotty to go to warp speed, and then time stopped. Maybe I'm doing okay but everybody else in my class has gotten a bit faster. Doesn't matter what the exact reason is, the net result is the same, I'm riding backwards.

So I was sitting there in an easy chair post race under the edge of the Family Bikes tent at the race today, coughing up chunks of some unspecified substance out of my lungs - it felt like chunks of bronchii - and trying hard not to vomit. And hating life. Absolutely hating it. This is not what I signed up for.

Sure, I can make excuses about horses for courses and all that but the fact remains I got my ass beat like a drum and have gotten it steadily beaten all frigging year so far, pretty much worse and worse each week, with the only real question being whether this week's beating was "bad" versus "really friggin' bad."

So I'm having a bit of a four o'clock in the morning moment tonight, and wondering if I have it in me to step up, basically, to a whole order of magnitude's worth of training effort and diet. Incremental improvement on an absolute scale is just getting my ass kicked incrementally worse, since the M 3/4 35+ field appears to be getting better across the board at a rate faster than I am improving. Results aren't the only thing I measure success by but they are the primary indicator and it would be nice to see *some* improvement there. It's not happening. It's going the wrong way. This is frustrating as hell.