To update quickly, the week prior to training camp was insane...deployment ended up taking 50 hours, almost straight. I only took 3 3/4 hours out of that time for quick naps at work and 2 1/2 hours for eating food. The rest was solid deployment-related work. It was the most I've ever done and this was my first deployment experience ever. The support my co-workers provided was awesome and it really helped at 2 am Monday morning (the day everyone was coming into work and expected the system to work) when one of my co-workers was on IM with me, keeping me awake and helping me think through solutions to our last problem. It's hard to think after working intensely so hard and with so little sleep.
No need to bore blog readers with this info, but I was very pleased with how that went off. It is something I feel very good about and was a very large part of my life (well, still is, and I'm happy about it). The rest of the week prior to training camp (after deployment) was still very hectic due to bug fixes now that the system was being used in production and some remaining deployment activities that hadn't been necessary prior to that. Didn't get more than 3 hours of sleep any night that week.
Training camp-- We all took LT tests the first day and got to know some top-notch coaches and Kimberly Baldwin, one of the fastest women racers (while she was racing) in the US and world. The ColoBikeLaw girls are strong and fast, and we all seemed to gel very well. The roads in Scottsdale were smooth and flat/rolling for the most part. There were a couple of significant climbs, thrown in there for variety. I don't think I saw a cloud in the sky once the entire weekend. I was trying desperately to do base miles (hr < 143) as that's what I do in January. It was hard to go as slow as I wanted to with the group-ride mentality kicking in, especially every time the road tipped up. After training like this for so long, it's no problem for me to wave good-bye to the group and not care about going my own pace. It's what makes me fast in the spring. And, being overly fatigued, it didn't make sense to try to go any faster, even when my teammates were trying to get me to go faster. I don't give in easily to peer pressure...never have, it's just not worth it, not in January, anyway. I realized later that I was running ~80 psi in my tires all weekend. It's just so easy to be in "trainer" mode. Good thing I remembered to wear a jersey & helmet!
This week, I finally got to completely make up for all of the lost rest (> 9-12 hrs sleep a night all week) and yesterday on my ride, it was pretty amazing to see what the sleep did. My power was up very significantly and the effort necessary to push the pedals so much harder seemed so much less than it did in AZ (interesting since there's even waaay more oxygen down there than there is up here). So, I think that's the nitty gritty. The plan for this blog is to move it to a different site where I can host it myself. So, I've been procrastinating on posting here b/c I just want to get the new site going...but that's contingent upon getting a new internet provider so I can run my own server w/o necessary ports being locked down. All of that should happen in the 2nd week of February so that's what I'm looking forward to now.
One more thing before I sign-off...wasn't this weekend fabulous?!?!!?!!! Nothing like perfect spring weather in January! :)
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