Looking for focus

It's been a while since I posted about anything specific to training and racing, so here goes an update on that front. My intent is not to come across as negative, I'm having fun still, but as the first sentence of the next paragraph might imply, I'm not exactly tearing it up on my road bike, and as any competitive person knows, it's always more fun when you're winning...

The past two weekends I've had bike races with relatively underwhelming results. One was a long time trial and one was a circuit race on the Watkins Glen race track. Both races were fun unique and something new, but I walked away still not sure what to make of my own performance.

I don't really have a good explanation, I just wasn't great in either race and I'm not sure why. I feel like I'm training a lot of hours and having productive training sessions, but I'm just not going that fast. At the finish line Saturday a former teammate of mine, who noticed that I was absent from the front group for the last several laps of the race, asked "what happened?" I really had no response other than to just shrug my shoulders and say something to the effect of "you guys were just too fast for me today"...not really something that's too fun to admit.

I think part of it is that I've still been running, lifting and roller skiing and not focusing just on biking. That's sort of a catch-22 that I'm in right now. When I'm on the road for work, I have to run to stay in shape because I can't exactly carry my Felt road bike on a trans-atlantic flight, but running shoes, shorts and a singlet fit very nicely into my "never check a bag on a business trip" policy. The puzzling part however, is that I don't think this has changed drastically since last year. One of the great parts about having a training log is that it's really easy to look back on last year and see what you were doing, etc. Compared to 2010, I'm doing almost everything the same, slightly less biking, slightly more running, but overall hours and intensity is pretty similar, a little higher this year, but not drastically higher. Maybe I'm reading too much into a few races where things didn't go great for me, but between the crash and a general lack of continuity, it is getting frustrating. In the winter, it's always really cut and dry - GO SKI, and the only thing I might be guilty of is skiing too hard or too much.

So, I'm not really sure where this leaves my training goals right now. I'll be on the road a lot over the summer, which means I'll be running more. Maybe I shouldn't fight it and just try to do some focused running training. It's not like I dislike running (like most of the guys I bike with do), I enjoy it. Who knows...For the next few weeks though, I'm not going to stress about any specific racing, just train to have fun and be fit and take some time to figure out what I can realistically focus on given my current career choice.

I am looking forward to all the travel coming up as well as all of the great weddings that Nancy and I will be invited to and involved in.