I’ve never been much of a gambler, but it seems that my (usual) slow recovery from the Ouachita Challenge and the proximity of the Whiskey Off-Road weekend (4/26-28) are making my participation in this weekend’s Slobberknocker race a proverbial roll of the recovery dice. If my last two hard training rides on Saturday and Monday had felt like 100% awesome, I wouldn’t question anything, and  I’d go to one of my favorite regional races and have a great time. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Given my current fitness, the power numbers were about 95% of what I’d normally expect. Sure, a 5% drop doesn’t sound like much, but when the amount of recovery days I took following Ouachita don’t produce the amount of recovery I’d usually expect, then I start to get nervous.

I’m not sure what it is about Ouachita that does it to me, but I’m trying to prevent what happened last year from happening again this year. I raced, thought I’d recovered, then went to Slobberknocker and Cohutta 100 on back-to-back weekends. The three proved to be a deadly combination from a recovery standpoint, because by Syllamo’s Revenge (mid-may), I felt absolutely useless. I was basically forced off of my usual training for the weeks leading up to the Mohican 100 at the beginning of June. I managed to make the best of it, but it didn’t do much for my race results.

So, as Coach said, we’re taking it day by day. My legs felt alright yesterday on my recovery-ish ride (mostly spinning with a few hammery-spots to see if I still felt gassed). I’m going to the Tiger Lane crit tonight to race with the Cat4 men. The short/high-intensity effort should be good for fitness without too much stress. It’s sad that even though there are enough capable women in Memphis to make a decent criterium, they’ve so rarely shown up to the event in years past that the promoter actually took women off the website flyer and just asked me which race I want to jump into, and that he’d give me a requisite payout just for showing up (if you register online, they actually have all women listed with cat5 men, though in the past, they were on the flyer as racing with the cat 4s).

I digress.

In hit-by-car news, I’ve started PT sessions to try and heal the severe contusion in my right glute where I hit the ground in my Mazda-induced flight. The muscle is so hard and knotted that I can barely get into it by sitting on a lacrosse ball (a foam roller or quad baller is basically useless). Physical therapy has been a combination of the therapist digging knuckles/thumbs into the area and using Ultrasound to control the resulting pain/inflammation. It’s pretty intense, but hopefully it will bring back my original level of muscle function for that area.

I’ve got a huge season ahead, so hopefully I can skirt the edge of “too much” that I’m finding right now and get right into “totally kicking ass.”