Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Denny's Free Breakfast & Living with a Recovered Mind


There's nothing like starting your morning off with a Denny's grand slam breakfast (less the $1.80 for coffee) at 6am. Brendan, Cory Dubrish, Nick Boswell and Sean Murphy (my roommates) got up at 5:45am to head to Denny's and I couldn't fall asleep. I laid in bed, tossing and turning, thinking about how I probably wouldn't fall back asleep since I got up at 5:45 both Saturday and Sunday for clinical and thinking about the fact that Cory would wake me up unintentionally when they all returned. Staring at the ceiling, I saw a line of light beam through the window as Cory's car rolled down the drive towards a table of free grand slams. Then I thought, "What the hell, I gotta live a little," and I began speeding down Catherine street with a half frozen windshield.

The best part of all of this is that I'm starting to feel like a normal person at the beginning of my fourth day off of the bike. It's funny thinking back to how cloudy my mind was and how lazy I became at the end of my last base month. After three weeks of 15-20 hour riding weeks on top of nursing school, I was baked. Throw in family, friends and time with Juanita (my girlfriend) and you're looking at no free time and a lot of "I wish I had energy to do this..." moments.

This time off is critical. Darrell Anderson (my fantastic coach) and I had a long talk last night to figure out what I need to do to fully recover and how my schedule is going to work out with the coming UofM Cycling Team training camp in Helen, Georgia. We've figured out an extra few days of rest before the camp will make for the most benefit considering we will probably ride 20-30 hours with some being race time in Kentucky at the end of the camp.

And, thinking about my goals for the coming season, I've put some thought into not doing as much track sprint work as I did last summer, but instead incorporating some longer, pursuit intervals. With time trial intervals on the road and pursuit intervals (track time trial) intervals on the track, I will be training my strengths. Limiting my time spent training sprints will ensure I have a foundation to sprint from, but will more importantly allow my time trial abilities blossom to the next level. Anyone have any other ideas?

2 comments:

BrendanBenson said...

6:00AM breakfast was too early. I'm dead now. So much for the 8 hours of sleep us cyclists need for recovery.

Chris said...

Haha... i went to denny's that morning as well, but the line was way to long around 8.30am so we left and went to Angelo's instead :-)