Unfocused Brainwaves... Early Morning Farewell Part II

I looked at my camera today and saw that I haven't really taken that many pictures. I have over a hundred random shots of faces, landscapes and cities, but there are so many gaps, so many things I'm not going to be able to show people back home because I either didn't have the camera, or was too busy to get a picture.

Take Nelson for example. Amazing area, ringed with mountains and beaches, very picturesque. However. I was on a mission. A mission of four-day survival. My routine (aside from new years) was get up, drink mad amounts of coffee, eat, spend the day racing and riding, eat again, watch the news and go to sleep. Rinse and repeat. I was so tired most of the time it would have been an enormous effort just to leave the house. I saw some amazing things out on the courses, but it would have been a little odd to sit up in mid-gasp, reach into my back pocket and snap a lovely photo at 80k an hour screaming down some twisty descent. Ah well.

Wanganui is mostly my fault. I have very few pictures from Wanga-Vegas because I left rather suddenly. Opportunity called, Auckland racing and training was to be done, so I jetted almost without warning one day, much earlier than I had previously planned. Plus my batteries died. The one day that I did go out with my camera, I only got of a few shots on the way to the beach before it decided to call it an early day. For shizzle.

I guess the big picture (pardon the chauncey-ism) is that I was too busy just being here to worry about cameras. Things to do and places to go. People to see. Rides to ride and food to eat. And on that note this summer/winter was incredible.

I spent the coldest months of the year, (months I'm usually unmotivated to ride and bogged down in school) racing and riding in shorts and a jersey. I wore armwarmer and legwarmers maybe 4 times: warming up for races in Invercargill, the bottom of the world. I can't say that I've ever overtrained myself before this year, but I was rotten and injured by the end of January after 2 months of solid racing. You know what they say, you never know where the line is untill you've gone over it. That set me back by a few weeks, but I'm not worried. August is a long way away, and one of the biggest things I figured out this trip was one of the simplest lessons of them all. How to be a bike racer. How to get up every day and go training. Every day. Without fail. Lack of motivation and New Years's partying be damned, time to go. I've always had some excuse to not go training, whether it was school, work, weather, being tired from school or work, etc. These last few months I haven't had any of those available, and I feel better than I ever have on a bike. The challenge is going to be carrying that work ethic over into April when I go back to work and school.

For now I'm just thinking short term. Get packed, go ride, bask in a last day of sunshine, get to the airport on time, get home, get unpacked, back to racing on Sunday. The story never ends for an adolescent-minded adult like myself. On to the next day, making some kind of progress toward idealist ambitions like professional athletics, rock star journalism, or who knows what else. I'm not worried, just packing and enjoying the day. DT