First Week Back

We have arrived.  After a couple of months separated as a family, we have rejoined in New Orleans, ready to start down a new path on our journey.  My first week has passed, and it was mostly pretty darn good on all fronts.  

I am rekindling my friendship with my bike.  I am not lying when I say I had ridden maybe 4 times between March and May.  No, I am not being a sandbagger or closet trainer.  When it came time to move my bike, I had my race wheels on it from the only race I have done this year at the beginning of April, and they were, flat.  I have talked about it on my blog for the past few years, but cycling has just been a sore spot for me.  After 3 years of my slowest bike splits ever, decreased ability to join in with groups, a couple of bike fits that made me more and more uncomfortable, and one bike malfunction after another, I was just not loving it anymore.  I didn't understand it, and I still don't, really.  How could my favorite discipline and my strength just fall to pieces?  How did my ability to ride tons of miles turn somehow disintegrate into not being able to ride 20?  

But for some reason, I am ready to get back on it.  Forcing it was not working, so I didn't force it.  I scheduled nothing.  I didn't ride.   And then I moved down here and the first thing I wanted to do was get back on my bike.  So far I have ridden 3 times in the 1 week I have been here.  They are nothing big...just 20-25 mile rides.  There is not a lot of riding ground where I live now, so I will eventually have to find a way to drive about an hour to meet up with friends on the North Shore, but I am going to give it a few months before I try to take it to the next place.  For now, I am just happy I care to ride again.

A view from the levee by my house- across the river is St Peter's Cathedral and the French Quarter.  I have a little loop I can do here without worrying about cars.  

I think some simple things that need to happen over the next couple of years are :
1.  I need a new bike.  It is time.  8 years on my trusty Cannonade...surely it is time?  I have put some miles on that baby.
2.  I need a new bike saddle.  I love my ISM saddles.  I have had great success with the Road, but for some reason this one has just never felt quite right.  Searching for the perfect saddle is tedious because it affects your overall fit, and that makes it tough to start throwing on new saddles.
3.  I need a bike fit that works for me.  I have tried since I have had Isla.  I really have.  I have been fit by 3 different people.  I am still not there.  I gave up for a while, but giving up has gotten me no where as well.  Time to dig around New Orleans.

The trickier thing that I need to nail down is...has my Epstein Barr Virus re-activated?  All the symptoms have been there since last fall, especially.  My running friends were the first to comment that they noticed the change, and it didn't seem to be training related.   (My running group has full access to my training log.  Oddly enough, it is just such a great group, we have access to each other's training and it never feels weird or competitive.  It is insanely supportive).   I have felt pretty decent since I have had Isla, until this fall.  I have never felt as good as I used to feel, and I am not sure that I ever will.  But, I have felt good enough to have some good racing.  But when I feel bad, I just feel bad.  I can barely soft pedal a bike for 30 minutes or run 1-2 miles at my worst.  For about 8 months I have felt that something is not right.  It came right around the time I had a "strange viral bronchitis infection" that wouldn't go away.  That was exactly how the last round of this all started.  It doesn't seem to matter if I lighten my training load or even sit out completely.  It is not a "rest" issue.  I did get my blood panel checked when this all started, but my PCP (not the doc that helped me figure out what was wrong initially) just checked the normal iron, hormones, etc.  I told him that would all be fine, and I was right.  All was in order!  I begged him to check EBV, but he wouldn't, citing some insurance yada yada junk.  Now that I am in Nola,  I just need to find a new doctor here, go in, run the test, get the numbers, make some sense of them, and see what's up.

So, that is where I am.  I want to race again.  I really want to be training.  I look back at the past few years and think that they have been such a struggle.  For most of the time, I thought it was because I was a mom and raising Isla was just plain hard.  But now, I think more that it has just been tough for me health wise, and when you aren't healthy, nothing is fun.  The thing is, I got All-American last year.  It wasn't a bad year on paper.  But I felt awful the whole year.  I never had a good race- not one single triathlon where I felt some satisfaction or felt like maybe I was really able to push myself.  I have tried the "race for fun" thing.  But, even that wasn't fun.  Part of what makes triathlon fun for me is pushing my body and my mind.  When that is not available to me, I just don't have that much fun going through the motions of swim-bike-run.

That was a long way of saying that I still do love this, and I am glad to see I am enjoying the bike.  I hope I can stoke the fire enough to turn this into some real training with some good physiological responses.  I would still love, love, love to get back into road racing and TT racing.

And some pictures of my first week back In Nola :) I think we are going to love this chapter in our lives and our new environment.

The lazy river

Spending time with Mema

Future dog walker :)

Setting up the stage for Wednesdays on the Point- a free jazz fest on the levee just a few hundred yards from my house...every Wednesday all summer long.  It is insane the amount of awesome, free music in this city.  They just make up excuses to have festivals here after work.  

I have swam a whopping 1500 yards since we moved here.  This is not a big swim community, so I can only swim laps 3 x week at certain times.  Of course when I went I was the only person there, too.  So my swim training now takes place in the splash pad with Isla.