Ever Had One of Those Days...

...when the last thing you want to do is ride/race? Well those don't come too often for me, but Sunday definitely was one of them and for the life of me I could motivate myself to even remotely want to drive a mere 45minutes to race a crit. Woke up with an allergy headache (which is rare for me) and feeling absolutely flat; so I pulled the plug on the St. Johns crit. Great thing about racing as a hobby is you don't have to go when you feel like crap and this is absolutely a hobby.

Friday evening we hosted my nieces for dinner (while my bro and his wife were in Spain) which is always good as they are awesome kids (I guess not so much Ashton now since she just turned 20!). Deb and I caught a late movie on TV and ended staying up way too late.

Saturday morning Ian and I raced in Bolivar's YMCA First Annual Youth Triathlon. The turnout was decent, but not what I was expecting/hoping. Ian was the youngest in his age group (he is 9 in the 9-12) and we talked several times about simply giving it his best and not expecting to win against kids much older (he heard blah, blah, blah and focused on winning). After a light breakfast he and I rode our bikes down to the city pool and along the way we previewed the course; he wanted to know exactly where he would be riding and running (nice planning). After setting up our TA we jumped in the pool for a couple warm up laps and then it was game time. Below is a compilation video of our race (I am the one in a red top swimming behind Ian in his age group wave in the opener). Long and short of it - Ian swam pretty decent, killed it on the bike, and ran beyond my expectation on the final leg resulting in a win in his age group (by nearly 10 minutes). In the video it shows us catching most of the younger age group who did 1/2 the distance. I-tri was pretty stoked to say the least and even pulled out the Lance Armstrong quote (from the TdF) during the run that "sometimes you're the hammer and sometimes you're the nail" at which Ian told me "today I am the hammer" . He is already showing quite the ability to suffer and excel...

After the race we all loaded up (Deb, Ian, Jake, Andie, and I) and headed to my folks spread for a day at the farm. With lots of food and games the day was a lot of fun. Made our way back home late that evening after some home-made ice cream with the folks. Jake and Andie headed into SGF for a bit before coming home and finishing up packing for his JBD running camp near Hermann. Temps for this week is far better than has been so we are hoping Jake has a good time.

As I mentioned above Sunday morning found me feeling less than ok and not feeling a race in my future. We got Jake off to camp (heading up with one other teammate) then it was back to catch the last TdF stage. Ian was stoked to see Cav CRUSH it again in the sprint. It is crazy that he was won 15 times in only 3 years - that's nutty.

The rest of the day was pretty much spent on the couch napping (all of us), watching some movies, and playing some Catan. We grilled up some ribs for dinner and later we all crashed early trying to find some renewed energy for the upcoming week.

Outside of feeling a little off with low motivation to race Sunday I am enjoying my last two weeks of downtime/rest period from the bike (with one more to go) and I figure that also influenced me to stay home. Oh well, 'cross specific training starts in one week and with races coming pretty much every weekend starting in mid-September to skip one isn't that big of a deal.