God is trying to tell me something...

Everyone has their own little tricks to get them thru a time trial. I play music in my head. Happy music. And I plan which songs I'm going to have go on in there for different parts of the course. Today was not going to be a happy music day.

I'm heading down to Dismal Dash... and I realize that I have left my towels by the door.

Then I realize that when I packed up the truck Saturday night that I left the Garmin on the charger. Ok, its raining, its cold, I have no towels, my fitness level sucks, and oh, I have no computer. All ok. I dont flap easy. I can deal with all this.

Then I pick up my chip as this race is chip timed. And by the time I get back to the truck I discover that I have dropped the chip somewhere. And I cant find it. So I have to go beg for another, with the understanding that if it doesn't turn up I'm going to be out some dough.

Ok.

And then I take the bike out of the truck and start to put the wheels on it. Whereupon I discover that my hub on my disc wheel has separated from the wheel. (just the body, not the actual spindle.) I almost put the bike back in the truck, but said f'it. It wasn't a crit, and since I could jimmy everything back on, and got it real tight with the skewer, I figured if I crashed, I wasn't going to take anyone else out. Plus it was raining, and you usually get hurt less crashing in the rain.

Riding around the parking lot, I found the chip in a pothole full of water. This after getting a new number, so I just turned the chip in.

At the start there was a huge gap in the 40+ chicks field, so the likelihood of me having carrots to run down was small. Oh, and my team mate who had gum for me ended up on another part of the course.

When I got going I had no idea what kind of speed I was carrying. Which was probably a blessing as my finish time was a new personal worst. What happened to the happy little diddy that I normally play in my head? It kept getting taken over by that song from the Color Purple... God is trying to tell you something. You know, right now. I kept battling back with the theme from Rocky, but I'd get half a verse in, and then whammo, the record would change. Kind of schizophrenic time trial thinking...

Oh, and if anyone finds these really cool gel arm pads for aero bars... they are mine. After the turn around I kept feeling this hard edge on my arms, but just decided to suffer thru. I'm figuring when I got out of the saddle to get back up to speed the arm pads must have stuck to me instead of the bars and took the chance to liberate themselves.

I made it back in, new personal worst time ever, but somehow with a few $$ to pay for a whole new set of arm pads. Tommorrow I'm off to Florida for the ultimate stupid trial of the year. I'll spend a whole week listening to hydrology, climate, crop, economic experts and will try hard not to rip my eyes out. By the end of the week, I think I'll have set a new sufferfest record. First today, and then the trial. I figure that I should be ready to kill tt's after this week. After this week the rest of the season is going to be EASY!

Thanks to all the officials and volunteers for suffering thru me today. Yes, I actually have done this before. Maybe once or twice...