A Weekend For Everyone

Soulmate is off to a hermitage for the weekend, and you'll see why in this video:

She is a gentle and quiet soul who craves only silence and asks only for enough time to contemplate life a little. What she gets is a noisy and demanding toddler and a noisy and demanding husband too. I thrive on noise and chaos, and Katie seems to be following in my footsteps, not Soulmate's. She loves music (hooray!) and is really into singing and dancing (or at least dancing while mommy or daddy sings). She has started to find all sorts of things screamingly funny, such as "Row Your Boat" at variable speed:


Actually, the weekend is shaping up well for all 3 of us. Soulmate gets all weekend to sleep in, sit quietly and read, think, and pray to her heart's content. Katie gets most of the weekend with me, running errands, going to "Run and Read" at the ECFE school Saturday am, church Sunday, and lots of time poking around the backyard looking at stuff (her new passion is going up and down the 4 stone steps from the patio to the goldfish pond).

I get to entertain Katie and do all the other fun Daddy stuff, AND ride with Big Jim and the young punks on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. Katie's favorite babysitter will be over both days to spot me while Big Jim puts the hurt on. Plan is for the same 4 hour 5 climb marathon we've done the past 2 Saturdays. I haven't ridden since Sunday, so we'll see how the climbing goes.

We need to get some decent riding in soon, since training camp is next Thursday through Sunday, and I doubt my younger Cat 1,2 teammates will want to wait around for an old geezer like me to catch up after a hard climb or tempo effort. This is usually when I make big gains in my fitness, since I'm running at a very high intensity level just to keep up with my teammates' moderate ones. Oh well, that's what happens in races too, so I might as well get used to it in training.

I'm psyched for training camp for another reason: the reigning state TT champ is on our team, and he's going to dish on a bunch of training secrets, as well as help us dial in our TT bike fits. I hope a whole bunch of talent rubs off on me in a hurry. I'd love to make some big gains in my TT speed before the age curve catches up to me fully. TT bike and equipement: check. Training secrets and bike fit: check. Winning my age group category at the state TT: jury's still out.