Did you ever play World of Warcraft or any other civilization-take-over-style game? No? Ok, fine, well in those games there is a map covered in fog that can only be cleared away by traveling into the fog revealing the map beneath. It looks like this:
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| Dude. You gotta move around. |
This is how I think of the world; clearing the fog of war bit by bit as I travel around. Well, March is in full swing and I am super excited that I get to clear some fog from my map with a slew of local races. How excited did I get for a weekend fog-of-war-clearing racing vacation? Well, here is a folder that is on my computer called "March Racing":
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| Excessive. |
Containing PDF files that I created all by my lonesome with pictures like this:
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| The past weekend's travel map. Totally pointless. |
Lets take a second here to note the total irrelevancy and uselessness of this picture to my general well-being. When I got in my car, I did not load up the PDF document with itemized directions, no sir, I took out my phone and searched "Sonora, CA" on Google Maps, pressed navigate, and listened to podcasts for 3 hours with frequent interruptions like "In 1000 feet, keep straight on yada yada yada back to your podcast that you are kind of paying attention to." This unnecessary preparation can be likened to making a hand drawn map of the grocery store with all the items' locations, which you would ignore instantly because its just getting groceries and the isles are labeled and its not that big of a deal. You would think I have never driven a car somewhere new before. Anyways, I love bike vacations, got it?!
I call bike races vacations because that's what they are. Training is a lot of work, racing is a lot of fun, and going somewhere new is THE BEST THING EVER, so race weekends make me really happy. Probably the biggest bonus is that, unlike other vacations, there is no real work in planning involved (just fake work that I make up for myself, like making dumb maps and "weekend at-a-glance" note cards). You drive out a day early, pre-ride the beautiful course, and then Yelp a dinner spot. Suddenly, you have all these pictures!
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| Its not just the green landscape, its the smell and the calm warm weather that make these rides so good. The pace of an easy ride is perfect for short attention span outdoor lovers. |
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| Out to dinner with my shoes. Cheapest date ever! Not great conversationalists, however... |
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| I do not want to be a cow, but, if I had to be, I could get used to it. |
I also raced, which is kind of my whole deal, but I find training races uninteresting to talk about when the primary focus is to ride as hard as I can and probably lose. Its not that I lose on purpose, its just that the nature of the "training race" is one of little strategy, and great amounts of self destruction. I was 5th at Ward's Ferry and 4th at Fort Ord, for the record, but I don't really think about these races that way. What I look at is how hard I was able to make the race for myself, and I made them really hard, so that is a success. Its actually a very nice difference from the upcoming season, where the focus is 100% about winning. These races are 100% about training, which makes them easy on the mind (hard on the legs).
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| Well, do you have a flag? |
Since I foot the entire bill for these training race weekend vacations, I have to figure out a way to keep them under budget. My budget is essentially this: "You have no money, ever, why do you even look at your bank account?" I can only go out to dinner occasionally. Going out to dinner is getting strange, this weekend I got a plate of food with an orange that had apparently been claimed by another country already.
I ate the orange anyway, despite my lack of flag. I know military takeovers are kind of taboo these days, but I really like oranges, and I didn't think anyone would notice. I think I'm in the clear, apparently someone else in the world is trying to take over a lot more than an orange slice, sounds like a jerk move to me. Anyways.....
Not being able to go out to dinner is fine by me, I have actually gotten quite good at eating in my hotel room. These days I chop up a ton of veggies, make a giant bag of rice, buy a
rotisserie chicken, and make some salad dressing. I proceed to carry that all around and eat it all weekend.
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| Mobile nutrition at its finest! |
Food blogger I am not, so deal with that picture being merely normal, lacking some fancy wooden bowl from some ancient tribe on a bed of flowers and some strange garnish which has the same effect as wearing a fancy hat in public (you cant eat it, and it seems to have no other purpose, so why is it there? This is my philosophy for many, many things).
Beautiful places, new places, chopped up food in a Rubbermaid, breakfast lunch and dinner in bed, spotty internet, racing your face off, and semi-listening to podcasts for hours retaining .01% of the information are all reasons I love race weekends. Luckily my military takeover of the orange slice stayed under the radar for the most part, and I was able to clear a lot of the fog off of my World of Warcraft map. I still have a lot to go, which I am thankful for, could you imagine if you didn't have new places to check out? You would feel like a hamster (the word hamster has no "p" in it?! WHAT WAS I BEING TAUGHT IN SCHOOL ALL THOSE YEARS?!) and probably understand a lot more about that running wheel they seem to love so much.
That's all for this week, here are a few more pictures of my weekend:
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| Weakest attempt (has a "p" by the way, senseless language we speak) ever at a wave-explodes-on-rock picture. |
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| Pebble Beach and the Fog of War |
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| Browsing music just isn't the same any more. Side note: Sonora has 15 thrift shops. So there's that. |
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