Wait, let's back up. I WENT to King's Valley on Saturday. I got on my bike. I turned my pedals. And I barely avoided a DFL.
Yeah, it was that bad. Within the first quarter mile of the race, my legs felt like painful, heavy bricks. I knew that things would not go well. They didn't. I popped at ten minutes. TEN FREAKING MINUTES.
I was pissed. Pissed enough that I wanted to quit. So pissed that I wanted to pull over and throw my beloved new bike in to a ditch and throw a tantrum.
ButI didn't quit. I met a lovely lady named Christine and we toughed the race out together. Because of her, I finished. Had she not come along and worked with me, I would not have felt too embarrassed to quit. So, thanks, Christine. You rock.
I came home and proceeded to spend the next hour rehabbing my legs because Sunday meant SKIING. Ailey and Ritchie were in town to ski and damnit, I was going to ski.
Sunday was a lovely day to head to Clark Canyon:
It was such a lovely day that Ailey and Barkernews and I decided to hang out for awhile in the Canyon and by "hang out", I mean "sit in the sun for an hour while Barkernews tries to fix his broken tele binding" or something like that.
Barkernews was SOL on the whole fix-it thing, so he tried various methods to extricate himself from the Canyon, including employing the brute strength of his sister-in-law.
In the end, Barkernews' day was done. He headed for the bar. Ailey and Ritchie and I headed back up the lift and didn't stop skiing until the last chair. It was a pretty awesome day, minus the absence of Barkernews for most of it.The Hizz spent her time bossing everyone around in daycare and telling them exactly where to put all of the toys. She's pretty good at that. When we finally broke her free, I was pretty happy to see her, but she had other things on her mind, like throwing snowballs.
I know that several times before, I have sworn off the whole racing/skiing combo weekend and truth be told, it wasn't entirely successful for me this time. However, since I raced prior to skiing, I can't blame poor performance on spending a day telemarking. I just sucked at racing that day. The skiing with Brian, Ailey, and Ritchie the next day more than made up for it. The truth? I love skiing above all other sports. Except maybe rock climbing. Skiing just makes everything better. Therefore, I will continue to sacrifice training days for snow days. It's totally worth it.