bikingandbaking: Photo of my road bike leaned against a gazebo (you must face the gazebo alone)
recipes and ride reports ([personal profile] bikingandbaking) wrote2016-04-07 08:36 pm

anxiety, dreams, goals?

I've had a lot of pre-ride jitters manifest as anxiety dreams, but I'm not sure I've ever had them before a 100k. I've had two this week. (I don't remember exactly what they entailed now, and dream descriptions are generally only interesting to the dreamer, but I woke up and distinctly realized they were anxiety dreams about the 100k.)

I'm still vastly out of shape, although I my brain is fairly confident that, barring really awful weather (I'm not doing 90 miles in driving sleet this year), or the flu that's going around the office, that I can gut out 68 familiar miles. I just...haven't ridden that far in a long time. My shoulder is OK, my hand is OK, I have been riding some, but it seems daunting in a way it hasn't since before my first populaire.

It's longer if I add the to/from to the total; I might drive to the start, I might not. It seems wrong, somehow, not to ride out there. ([livejournal.com profile] dphilli1 alas has had to bail out even before the day-of; his ankle has gone from keeping him from running (hence biking!) to no biking either. He wasn't up for 90, so the plan was to drive. We'll see. I need to decide, like, yesterday. Probably I'll ride out there, and if I have to, call for a ride home afterward.

I also need to hook up a new cyclocomputer -- the old one's mount cracked in the crash, and it's been in my handlebar bag since -- still registering miles but no longer on the bars. We'll see if that happens before the ride either; it's not like I'll be trying to set any personal speed records.

I'm tentatively looking at the rest of the season, too; I'll know more once I've knocked out 68/90 miles where my body stands. Even without the cancer and the crash it was not shaping up as a terribly good off-season; new responsibilities at work have been keeping me busy and I've lost the hang of making time to hit the gym again. I am definitely looking forward to doing my first team event -- a flat 200k dart should be a great way to do that. The big question is what if the 200k goes well. If it goes poorly, the answer is clear; do more 200ks. If it goes close to as well as in 2014, though, do I dare more? Somewhere in the midst of fear and uncertainty and mortality rates, I put PBP 2019 on my calendar; there's no time like the present to get back into the habit of being in brevet shape. But I need some confidence-boosting successes right now, more than I need challenges. Hopefully Saturday will be the former.

Post a comment in response:

If you don't have an account you can create one now.
HTML doesn't work in the subject.
More info about formatting

If you are unable to use this captcha for any reason, please contact us by email at support@dreamwidth.org