This is absurd

Last night I helped out at a little league practice (9-10 year olds) for a team that a friend of mine coaches. I worked with the pitchers and catchers and overall it was a lot of fun and great to be around kids playing baseball. Sometimes, it's easy to forget how huge a portion of my life baseball was for so long. Anyways, we were forced to practice in a parking lot because the fields are still too wet to play on. They're too wet to play on because every day the temperature has gotten above 45 (about 3 days so far) it's been pouring rain with 35mph winds. Last night's practice was 40 degrees and very windy and the ridiculous part - that's the best weather that team has had to practice in so far this year, and that's April 21st (theoretically a month into Spring). It's difficult to teach 9 and 10 year olds how to catch when you have to spend 10 minutes re-adjusting the chest protector to fit over their SNOW SUIT. My former college baseball team has had 9 out of the last 10 games cancelled and basically will have to play 4-5 doubleheaders a week whenever the weather breaks (hopefully by June?).

I had a bike race on Sunday and Tuesday. Sunday's race didn't go great and Tuesday's race went really well, but in both cases, I finished the race colder than any ski race I've done in the last few years (other than maybe the Fischer Loppet 3 years ago when I made some unfortunate apparel choices). The 10 day forecast looks pretty dismal and I have still yet to go for a bike ride without 3 layers on top and bottom, and this is supposed to be my "summer sport". Tomorrow I'm racing in the Binghamton Circuit races and according to the weather forecast, I might be better off bringing a snorkel than my bike.

So, Mother Nature, you've shown us once again, you're the boss, now knock it off...April showers can't bring May flowers when if I'm still wearing a down jacket everywhere.

I would say this blog post could be filed among the "howling at the moon" category.

Let's do this!!

Last weekend, two things happened - I rode about 130 miles and spent about 8 hours cleaning, waxing and re-waxing my skis to put away for summer storage. I also cleaned up the make-shift wax room, which takes over about half of our attic for 5 months a year (the latter task was substantially worse than the former by the way).

The last few years I've noticed that there's usually about a 3-4 week period after my last ski race, where I am in denial about ski season being over and find it difficult to really get going biking or putting any type of structure into training for anything. I work out a lot, but typically don't put any thought or plan into what I'm doing. After spending all winter outside, all of a sudden, the thought of going for a bike ride in 30 degrees and windy weather, and dealing with numb fingers and the rush to get a dry shirt on after working out in the cold (do avoid getting sick) and everything else that goes along with the cold, seems like the worst idea ever.

Then after a few casual bike rides, and typically one or two with reasonably warm temperatures, it seems like a flip switches. I think that happened this past weekend. Saturday, I joined a bunch of my teammates on a 90 mile ride, including, for the first time this year, trying to go hard on a bike and really crank it up. My legs were thrashed, but the next morning, I had absolutely no hesitation in jumping on my bike and getting some more miles in. Mentally, ski season is finally over. That doesn't mean that I can't wait for November, but at the same time, I can look back on a great season for a variety of reasons, and be happy with it, and also look forward to the summer and biking.

Last night was the first GVCC Tuesday night race of the year and it took me about 5 minutes to try to attack off the front. It wasn't the best race, but I felt pretty good and it was good to get back in the action. This Sunday is the GVCC Bloomfield Classic, which is a tough course that also overlaps with my roller ski TT course. We'll see how it goes, but I'm definitely looking forward to pinning a race number back on and getting out there. The next couple months should make for some exciting races (and hopefully some decent results for my teammates and I).

Airplane food

Sometimes, when flying on foreign airlines, this type of thing is put in front of you...

Or this...
What is that thing in the bottom left? The menu said that this was a "Tapas plate". I think there may have been something lost in translation because I've never seen Tapas that look like this.

Sometimes I'm feeling adventurous and try everything...however this is also why I always carry Clif bars with me when I travel...