It Hurt

This post is past due...

Midwest winters call for hours and hours on the trainer...staring at the TV, listening to your iPod, thinking about what you would like to eat and deciding if you really need those final 15 minutes. This is the first winter that I've really concentrated on actually training, rather than eating pizza and watching movies all winter long and it recently paid off!

I picked up my Get a Grip Teammate, Eric, for a trip out to Winfield, IL (home of the amazing VOX podium sweep of 2005, at the USCF Illinois Championship Criterium). We were heading to the ABD Indoor 10k Time Trial. This is a really interesting event...they have two of these 8-up Computrainer extravaganzas set up. Everyone is calibrated and 3,2,1...their off. It's a mad-dash at 100% over a 10k course. There is a projector screen ahead of you that displays your place, time, distance, current/avg wattage & mph. Also on the screen is a graphical display of each riders current spot between the start and finish line...sort of like the carnival games where the horses move left to right. It's pretty wild.

Our new Get a Grip team bikes and kits were not in yet, so we had to go incognito at this "race." SIU beat Butler in the bracket buster the day before, so I donned my old SIU Cycling Team jersey for the day. The title of this post sums it up perfectly...It hurt. I've been on the trainer a lot this winter, but have not put forth such a hard and sustained effort to date. I did better than I figured I would have, checked out the results after all heats were complete and was pleasantly surprised to see my name in the #1 spot for the Cat 3 racers!

This was the 1st win for the Get a Grip Team and a foreshadow of the season to come. Giggity!