Lighten Up

I'm wearing a ball cap as I write this. A red one, with a velcro closure and a Stonyfield Farm logo on the front. Why am I mentioning this? Absolutely no reason. I don't normally wear ball caps around the house though. I rarely wear them outside either. When I do, I don't wear them backwards or all crooked. Cycling caps, that's different. Francine recently wrote a post about cycling caps. Well, sort of. I'm not sure I've ever seen her without one. I can rock the cycling cap too. In fact, at the running race on T-day, I wore my Kelme cap. Backwards. More aero, you know? What I Think's post had links to a few makers of wool cycling caps. These are the coolest. And the warmest. I've only owned one before, I think it was a Giordana, but I'm not sure. It was a Rossin cap, it matched my bike, and it had the wool earflap. Like my Giordana world championship stripes jacket, it mysteriously disappeared one day. I'm not sure about the cap, that could have been lost. The jacket, that vanished from a team mate's bus one day up at Killington. Much later in life, I found out that a junior we had on our team at that time had made himself a life as a thieving scumbag/wannabe pro bike racer. He happened to have dnf'd the previous stage and hung out in the van all day. Hmmm...

Anyway, that's irrelevant. Part of the theme here is to lighten the load. You see, after reading FL's post on hats, I almost pulled a quickdraw on the plastic and ordered up a few woolies for me head. But I didn't. Partly because I knew it would be better to see the goods in person, especially hats priced from $25-50. The other reason was, well, I'm trying not to overconsume. Astute followers of this blog know the "resist marketing" theme comes up from time to time. Did you all catch Strangelife's "acquisitive" post last Friday? I hope you did. If not, go read it.

There were a number of similarly-themed posts up last week, and I think I read somewhere about an organized "boycott Black Friday" movement of some sort somewhere. When I was working in Framingham last week, I sat amongst a bunch of kids whom I do not know. All they talked about all day was what they were going to buy on Friday, and how early in the morning they were going to head out in order to snag this or that. Yikes. I did not buy anything on Friday. Funny thing is, I did get a shipment in the mail, three boxes of shoes. All running shoes. New trail runners, well, I need those. You may remember my Grid Labrynths from the footwear nodcast. They held up well, and I ran in them well past 300 miles, probably more like 450, which is more than double what I usually get out of a pair of shoes. So I needed a new pair. I also tried a different model Saucony trail runner that was on sale, and additionally purchased my first pair of racing shoes, some Grid Fastwitch-2's. With all these shoes piling up, I felt like Imelda Marcos, and almost wrote a blog entry about it... Found out yesterday that would've sucked.

You're excused if you didn't see Slow Your Roll last week. I've cut down on the number of blogs I read too. Not sure what happened with the "long post" from Monday, but traffic, and specifically new visitors, was off the charts. Maybe I'm on to something here. I don't know, as I don't track referrers, so maybe some popular mofo setup a link. I am however, disappointed that nobody took a shot at my fork analogy. Yes, I know that GeWilli at least made a mention, but I'm dissed that there was no one geeky enough to complain that I should have used fork() instead of "fork in the road". Or even forking a project. Yeah, sure, they're almost the same thing as a fork in the road, but geeks are usually such a nit-picky bunch.

Maybe everyone is just all kind, gentle, and full of love. So we've got that going for us. And yes, I know that Bolder used that line earlier in the week. I wonder if he golfs? The cyclocrossers though, do I detect waning enthusiasm, or is it just the blogs I read? From my cheap seat, Gewilli's vision of cross in January might not fly too high. My sensors are picking up signs of burnout. Think about it though, it makes sense. For me, the season started just six weeks ago. I've been motivated to go to at least one race every weekend, although traveling alone is getting old. This is the first time I've ever raced cross without a traveling partner/s.o. who also raced. In fact, I've probably gone to more cross races as a mere supporter than a racer. Can't say I miss stuffing all that shit into one car, dealing with someone else's pre-race anxiety or post-race misery, but I do miss stopping on the way home and wrapping my frozen fingers around a hot mocha and just commiserating. That just doesn't work by yourself. For the racing side of it though, as a few of us have discussed off-blog, you can't beat flying solo (pun-intended). Lighter is better, faster. It may be selfish, but I'm way more focused on racing when I go by myself, and you can't beat the extra room. Not to mention being able to turn up the volume for whatever pleases you...

This weekend will be it for me though, if I even race. My knees weren't too happy after Palmer. As noted in "long post 1," running big miles on Saturday would have been fine with a "normal" cross race, but not for double-duty at the Palmer dismount festival. I've got a 5K on Saturday morning which I plan to run hard. I'll have to evaluate my health and well-being afterwards, as it sounds like Wrentham has four dismounts/lap. Ughh. At least it is close by. As for the rest of you, yeah, if you started in September, ten weeks straight with a bunch of double weekends is enough to burn almost anyone up. Do yourselves a favor, just stop training, relax, ride a bit the day before the race, maybe run a little, and for (insert who/what you worship here) sake, stretch, stretch, massage, and stretch some more. Don't take your youth and health for granted. That's all my love for today, thanks for reading. Still got that ball cap on...