Prior to the State Championship Cyclocross race, I was training pretty hard for cyclocross (yeah, I know, seems like an obvious statement), but I wasn’t totally “set” on gunning for another try of the Master’s World Championship in late January. Something about winning the State race finally made it click, though.
The weather sucks pretty bad right now. We had a great run of nice weather up until early this week when the cold snow/rain started. Now, the extended forecast is pretty Belgian. Think I’m just trying to be Euro-cliche?
So, I’ve been on the trainer. The weather-bourne necessity of riding a trainer is something that makes or breaks racers. If you blow off workouts, you don’t get faster. It’s as simple as that. While you’re skipping interval day because (like yesterday) it’s 35 degrees and raining all day, your competition is doing this:
I put my headphones in, crank the Swedish House Mafia/Glitch Mob station on Pandora, and stare at the World Championship colors until the stripes burn into my retinas.
Along the same line, I was getting my latest ink worked on at No Regrets on Thursday, and told Joe (my artist) about the upcoming race. After a little brainstorming, we decided that if I win some stripes, he’ll fill the bottom flower of my half sleeve in the World Championship colors…
So, motivation has been found. Big time. In the next 5 weeks, I’m going deep into the rabbit hole of lactic acid and blurred vision, and hopefully finding the podium on the other side.
If/when you win a world championship then you get to wear that jersey in future world chanpionship races as well as in local, state, regional, and national races in that particular discipline only….You also get to put the world chanpionship stripes/colors on your own jersey but you cannot wear that jersey in any other discipline other than in the same type of race where you won your WC colors….I’m not sure about the legalistics of wearing those colors inked on your arms though…. ;-)