Love the Hurt: Thanksgiving Week

What a week to be thankful for. I was able to get in a lot of family time, training time, pick up a few more sponsors and even race a 5k Thanksgiving morning. It was really nice to have the four days off and get in quality time with the things I love to do! Let's start with the race. James set my schedule up for the week to have a big cycling weekend block and pretty much chill prior which means I was actually going to have some fresh legs going into Thursdays race which I was excited for. My last 5k was the Carlsbad 5000 back in March and with the vast improvements I had been seeing in my running lately, I was shooting for a sub 16. Well Thanksgiving morning I woke up sick. Amy and Scarlett both have this nasty sore throat/cough and as much as I tried to wash my hands and stay clear of germs - I got sick alongside with them. Even though I felt like crap, I just decided to do it anyway. It's not like I was doing a 1/2 or anything.

Since Amy and Scarlett were sick, I just took off solo and arrived down in Oceanside about an hour before the start. After checking in, I headed out for my 2.5 mile warm up and felt just OK. My legs felt great but the junk in my lungs kinda gave me some issues. The race was out of control, there were 5000 people in my race! I barely made it to the start in time and met up with some other BSK teammates and before I knew it the gun went off. My goal was to go out in 5:10 and just get a feel for the pacing since I haven't been training at this intensity. I came through in 5:12 and felt pretty good. I couldn't believe how far back I was from the lead pack, a lot of fast guys came down for this one. Mile two I kind of fell asleep a bit and lost focus and once I looked at my watch and it read 5:17 for mile 2, it woke me back up and I realized there was only a mile to go! I picked up the pace and started reeling in some guys and then with 800 to go, I really changed gears and charged in for a 16:16 finish.
My splits:
5:12
5:17
5:13
I placed 4th in my AG and 16th overall, you can check out results here.

I had a big training weekend lined up, here's how it went down:

Friday's ride: 3 hours, lots of climbing

Saturday: Put in 2500 meters at the pool then a 4hr ride up Palomar, again- lots of climbing

Friday and Saturday I rode while sick - but it wasn't enough to take me out of commision. I thought I could defeat it even with the load of work I was putting in, but Sunday morning when I woke up, I felt like hell. I had a 3 hr ride/30 min run scheduled but with me sweating with feverish conditions - any exercise was going to do more harm than good. Either way I was pleased with the work I put in and the monster ride on Sunday gave me a lot of huge mental/physical breakthroughs. With over 10k of climbing in two days, I still had decent legs on Sunday morning...starting to get fit.

My sponsorships for 2012 are really starting to take shape and I'm really excited to add Xterra Wetsuits, SportMulti, and FLEXR to the mix. Check out my Support page to learn a little more about them. I have a few more that I am trying to line up and I'm excited to see that all of the hard work I've put in is starting to bear a little fruit. Alongside my coach, I think 2012 is going to be a huge breakthrough year for me and I'm pumped to go out and compete and bring my best.

One more thing, check out this video that a buddy of mine from San Francisco sent me. He helped put this race together, it's the Single Speed Cyclocross World Championships. They definitely put some twists in the race as opposed to your typical Cyclocross race. Man, I hope Santa puts a Cyclocross bike in my stocking this year, it looks like a lot of fun, we need more races like this in SoCal!