Auf Wiedersehen

My dreams have been anxiety-riddled all week long.  There was one where I was stressed about how important a bottle of Gulden's spicy brown mustard is to almost every screenplay of my dreams... which upon awakening, I realized it isn't. 

I'm not just thinking about what to wear on Sedona bike rides and how well my outfits will look on Instagram (red desert, blue shorts, I'm looking at you).  I'm thinking about the near future and how far off the regular beaten path I normally follow into the "season" I currently am.  Even though I'm trying to not care about racing and such in 2018, I still have no other frame of reference since @ 2004 or so.

For the last many something years, I start riding a little more (than the least possible, given my job, bike commute and proclivity to enjoy mountain bike cycling on weekends) towards the end of March.  Not this time.  Then the 6 Hours of Warrior Creek, the first Saturday in April, fell kinda late on the calendar on the 7th.  My inability to come up with a proper replacement for my morning junk miles on the then nearby greenway has left me without a compass.  A Mancation to Sedona next week... Mancations are usually reserved for August or September.

It's the most different lead up to PMBAR that I can remember in the last decade or so.  I'm not really in the kinda shape I'm used to being in at this point.  At least 5-10lbs heavier.  A lot fewer miles in the legs.  Mancation always means more riding than I'd normally do over five or six days, but also lots of eating and drinking of things.  For the life of me, I have no idea if I'll be in better shape a week after coming back from Sedona or a bloated, worn-out, piece of shit that can barely pedal a bike up a slight incline.

I guess that would explain why unlike in years past, I'm not that worried about PMBAR.  I've come into it super fit (for me) plenty of times only to self-sabotage our efforts with poor navigational decisions or mebbe going a little too hard at the night-before pre-game.  That and sometimes my partner wasn't feeling it or just coming out of a unfortunate Spring malaise more than once.  With knowing that so much can go wrong, it seems like a lot of effort to try to do it right.

It's always fun regardless of the outcome, so why care too much about "performance?"

When I get back from Sedona and I have PMBAR is in the rear view mirror, I plan on switching gears (quite literally).

Call me stupid. It's been done said countless times before.  I've been too old to give shits for at least a decade.

I'm taking the SRAM Eagle shifty bits off the JaBronson and turning it into a 150mm full squish single speed smasher.  I'll probably write some more about it once I get some rides in, but suffice it to say, I can understand why other people like gears, especially in the year 2018.  They're actually working quite well and the chain isn't falling off and I'm climbing up all kinds of things... but they're not making my world necessarily a better place.

This is my world.  You just live in it.

I'll see you ding dongs in a week and change.