paths cross

Cooking dinner tonight felt like the real west coast.

There's a special kind of warmth which comes from fire. It's different than water warmth, electric warmth, or air warmth. It begins and carries differently. It ends differently. It has it's own smell, taste, and feel. It can only really be described as fire warmth. Maybe you know the feeling I'm talking about already.

Combine that feeling with a few drops of rain. Fire warmth and cool rain. The feeling of cool rain splashing on your skin, then immediately evaporating from fire warmth.

Now add the smell of dinner roasting by the fire. In tonights case, it was predominantly citrus with ginger. You can taste the smell.

You hear and feel rain falling on your touque. If it's raining hard perhaps your poncho magnifies the sounds.

It was all here this evening.

Dinner is ready and it's time to know the food. I like to see food, taste food, and know food. Know what the food is, it's story and journey. The food arrived here, and has been combined and arranged in this certain way. Now our paths cross.

Thanks for the Nourishment.

Rest well.

No Man's Land

6 or so laps in, this is where I found myself at Newton Heights tonight, pedaling to close the gap. 4 Laps of solo pedaling and an almost x 2.

Spend a time thinking about emptying the thought tank. The thing about emptying is it becomes both active and passive. Actively emptying to a point, while passively allowing the river to effortlessly carry thoughts on their way. The organism takes care of the rest.

Crit racing provides a cool backdrop for this practice. At a relatively easy pace, the thoughts can be scattered and spun through eddies and currents. Then things start to build and fun begins.

The pace becomes faster and race altering decisions become impulsively instantaneous. At one point, the intensity grows to a level where there becomes less room for thought, perhaps due to reduced cranial blood flow, or maybe Science 10's flight or fight focus.

In either case, eventually there is room for only one thought. "Go Now!" Your body responds, and that is it, until one more thought can squeeze out of your head. "All Now!"

Tonight this was the best place to be. One thought, then free. Free of everything and anything. One thought to instruct, then it's left the body. Awesomeness.

Nice racing guys. AMac, as always an attack to remember. Scotty, pulling up front will be good practice for this weekend's Sri Chinmoy triathlon. A-Russ, way to hang in there. That was exactly the perfect way for tonights race to go.

Rest well.

JSA II

Great day of training. Great day of living. Great day of breathing.



Just simply awesome.

Rest well.

Apple Sauce Ketchup

Ketchup goes with basically everything, and sometimes leads to applesauce.

Ketchup with sleep, Ketchup with laundry, Ketchup with e-mails, Ketchup with workout log, Ketchup with the bank, Ketchup with the car, Ketchup with the vacuum, Ketchup with Vega(?) and most importantly, Ketchup with all the ongoing science experiments in the fridge and cupboards.

One particular Ketchup trip to the cupboard beside the stove led me to a large family of fruit flies. Ahhh I think we have a winner . . . there must be a good experiment going on in here.

That's where the bag of golden delicious disappeared to. Fortunately they have only been MIA for a little over one week.

What to do with the 73% of each apple that is still edible?

Apple sauce. Now the whole house smells of delicious cinnamon apple sauce.

Great recovery Monday.

Rest well.

Catalyst

What will be the catalyst?

It's a challenging one to predict, and many times near impossible. The important thing is awareness to the enzyme's presence once it arrives. This may be according to it's own time line, or ours as determined by readyness.

Keep the eyes closed and ears quite so you can feel it when it comes!

Today the catalyst came knocking. I missed it for a couple hours, then slowly started to hear something different, something worth listening to. Ok that's what you're here to talk about. Now I'm ready to listen.

Just like Peter Pan, we each have a shadow which follows us around. We can learn a lot from the shadow.

The shadow is darkness. The shadow is fear, a self-created, non-real fear. It is only real in our mind because we created it.

What is the fear? How do we dissipate it?

Just as we understand the shadow, we understand the fear. We surround the fear with light and it dissolves. It ceases to exist in our mind and in our world.

This was a pretty solid weekend of training. Our ride yesterday was the one stop shop for Kelowna preparation. Start with pack riding, cornering, 180 practice, accelerations, hills, attacks, and finish with tempo and more attacks.

After the 1st couple hill repeats I thought, man my breaks must be rubbing, this is hard work. Ahh forget it, probably just an excuse. More hills, and onto the tempo. Riding along Blenkinsop we were cruising along at what felt like a good speed. I looked down to see I was in the small chain ring. What? This is way to hard for small ring work.

Finish the practice and check out the wheel. It's shaped like a Taco. Thanks to Karl @ OBB for fixing that one today. Wickedness.

20 minute run off the bike and Saturday has been Saturday.

This morning was the Thetis Lake Swim for Multiple Sclerosis. Really positive event, and great swimming by a number of athletes from the group.

90 minute post swim trail run / bush whack through the trees.

Rest well.

90 minute steady state-tempo 5 fixes everything, except maybe the legs. Ice will take care of those.

Rest well.

Quinoa Explosion

Keep breathing and smiling; the rest will take care of itself.

Wow, it's great to be in Victoria putting in a solid training block. The past couple weeks of racing have left me feeling recovered and energized. (Truthfully). T-3 weeks to the Big Apple.

Today was a typical building Friday.

Swim in the morning with some fast 200's. The splits: first 4 on 2:33, next 4 on 2:34. Ok, that's fine, but 2:29 is well within logical reason. Remember a short 8 months ago the 200pb was 2:31? Times change.

Next 200's workout: 2:29's. Maktub!

Mid-morning bike of the rolling base variety and a little wheelie practice to start and finish. Cross is coming.

Track in the afternoon. Wow, the group is running fast. I overheard the girls were splitting sub 3:20. Wicked Fastness!

Scotty showcased some awesome speed on the 200s with a 25er to finish. Nice.

Sweet pacing with JP & AP. Nice sharing of the work. Dude, man, yo, that's some solid team training.

Perogies and 2L of Antioxidant juice blend for dinner.

Rest well.