Friday Link, sort of

The new job started in earnest yesterday. What does that mean? It means I was not able to constantly keep tabs on the local blogosphere whilst running painfully slow and inefficient code searches. Instead, I got to waste my day the old-fashioned way - sitting in unproductive meetings. I'm a veteran of this sort of thing from a past life, but for me the last five years have been almost meeting free. No more. I'm going to need to brush up on my "let's get this moving" skills...

So let's get this moving. Dale's blog this week, as usual, stirred up my brain cells, at least the ones that still work. Mr. S always does a damn good job of putting out a thought-provoking message without saying too much. I guess that's part of being an artist. For a few minutes, I considered expanding his topic of shame and disappointment to include embarrassment, but then I thought better of that. I don't want to mess with the fine job he did of revealing just enough of his message to get us thinking, but not much more. The direction he took this was brilliant. The message is never as much or as little as it seems...

I don't know Dale very well. We've raced against each other, but not much, yet he's had a big impact on me. In 2006 he was active in racing. We first met at the WMSR when he put in a stellar time trial. I'd met him out on the road training before, but didn't know him. Being extremely fit and well-coached, he still lacked experience and basically got his ass kicked in the points race on the final night. I was among the five who lapped the field. Score one for solobreak. Yet being knocked out of the top five in the TT by an unknown gave me a little push.

The next time I ran into Dale was in the food market on the morning of the GMSR circuit race. We were both wandering around searching for supplies, and he struck up a conversation with the sketchy dude in the BOB jacket that he sort of recognized. We realized we'd met briefly before, and lived in adjacent towns. He asked me how I did in the prologue the day before, and I replied, well, I wasn't last, but I went backwards the entire time and finished damn close to it. Returning the question, he humbly told me he'd done pretty well, finishing second. Damn. Bigger push.

The discussion turned to climbing. I knew he'd been a triathlete in the past, and a very fit person overall, yet he told me he'd improved his climbing by "losing about 15 pounds." WTF? I could never do that, I thought. I probably weighed about 175 at the time, just a couple of pounds more than I did when I was 30. I'd never been a great climber, but used to be able to at least hold on to the lead group when the going got tough, even managing to win a few "hilly" races. Lately that wasn't working out.

We wished each other luck and headed back to the condos to prepare for the days racing. I'm not sure where he went on to finish on GC, but I got completely shelled on Middlebury Gap and limped home on the queen stage about 45 minutes down to the winner. Since that day, I haven't met up with Dale in person; I guess he's not racing as much this year. His story of an already fit guy losing fifteen friggin' pounds though, that stayed with me. He was pretty skinny, you know, calves that just looked freakishly ripped. I've never been like that, but I'm pretty sure that when I was racing in my early 30s I'd get my body fat percentage down into single digits. Last winter, with the running prep for the half marathon, I did not get fat and came into this season at about 172 pounds. Never went down from there. Up until August, I was satisfied. The "Best Western Incident" and my poor performance at the 40k TT the next day opened my eyes. I may have weighed the same as I did fifteen years ago, but now my BF % is much higher. I needed to do something. 160?

A few pounds came off easily. I had good form at the Bob Beal Stage race as a result, but even then I could tell that I wasn't nearly as lean as the dudes like Dale who win the 45+ category races on difficult courses. How far could I take this? I don't know, because I'd never tried before. My little "medical issue" set me back a bit, but now running season is upon us (at least for me) and I've resumed my quest to see how lean I can get. I'll stop at the end of the month and take a break for the winter, but the goal is to come into next year much fitter than the past few, and maybe even be competitive in the early season races like Jiminy Peak and Turtle Pond. This past week was a bit of a setback, but that's ok. A disappointment, but nothing to be ashamed of... More to come. Thanks for reading.