I’ve fallen from the road racing horse and I’m having trouble getting back on.
I haven’t done a single hard group ride or road race since… King’s Valley. Which was approximately 5 weeks ago. Not that I haven’t been training, dutifully doing my LT intervals (ok, maybe not my sprint intervals). I have a total mental block when it comes to the road now.
Don’t get me wrong, I ride my road bike about 4 or 5 times a week, 2-3 hours a day. But riding around town, west hills or not, does not compare to riding hard with a group; the mental battle just isn’t there to nearly the same degree. At all.
All I really want to do is mountain bike. Even race–and 2.5 hours of ass kicking MTB racing is NOT easy. No way. There is certainly a huge mental battle there. But its completely different from road racing. Everyone is on their own–it’s a time trial. You don’t get dropped from the group because there is no group.
I admit–I feel like a failure. I had such huge intentions of staying focused on road racing, of doing Elkhorn, of this, of that, and it’s FAIL FAIL FAIL. I lost my mojo in March and it never came back. So what do I do now?
Give up?
Go home?
Cry myself to sleep?
No way. I might have lost my road racing mojo, but I haven’t lost my mountain biking mojo–that grows expontially every day. It’s time to apply that confidence to the road bike and get out to PIR to mix it up. To remember. To test myself. I think I’ve been way too hard on myself with road racing in the past, and my competitive nature is very much “well, if you can’t win/stay with the pack, fuck it.” But I’m not getting any faster by not racing.
The road season is pretty much over at this point anyway–it’s too late for me to do Elkhorn or Mt Hood, Silverton and Rehearsal are the last one day races that were on my schedule (and I already made my mtb plans on those days), so all that’s left is PIR, crits, and Tabor. I can handle that. Hell, maybe I’ll even do High Desert Omnium or Eugene Celebration SR. All is not lost.
I need my mojo. I need all I can summon up so come cross time, I am ready and raring to go.
