How An Effervescent, Lop- Eared Bunny Destroyed The World!

And this is exactly what I did.

This week was interesting and not in a particularly good way.  It was one of those weeks that keeps your feet to the flames until you totally freak and learn a little something about yourself.

That day, that Stick-a-fork-in-my-eye day that started Tuesday, did not end when the clock struck midnight.  Rather the fallout from that day carried into the rest of the week.  When I left that shop, tired, hungry, pissed and trying to put a positive spin on the whole wasted day, I did not notice one little detail.  That little detail came up to bite me a few days later.

Let me rewind a bit.  After Tuesday, I had a recovery day.  Wednesday had nothing on the schedule but a short, easy run.  I was busy at work that night but light the next so between Tuesday and Thursday, there was a fair bit of rest.  In the wee hours of Friday morning, which is still Thursday (the new day starts when you mark it with a pot of coffee. Sleep is nice but not always necessary and midnight is an arbitrary marker) to us denizens of the graveyard shift, I set the bike up on the trainer to do a short-ish, fairly intense workout with VO2 intervals.  Wriggled into some old workout clothes that are too, ahem, revealing for anything other than a 1am trainer ride, mixed up a diluted sports drink, etc, put on my shoes and away I went.

No, wait, that is not how that happened.  Remember that detail?  That detail was a small, black bag with a pair of shorts... AND my cycling shoes.  It was sitting in that shop in Boca.  Locked up, because that is what shop owners do at 1 am, and over 50 miles away.  Now at 1 am, having already run today, my options were a little limited.  VO2 intervals were a little too intense to do without being clipped in.  This was yet another workout screwed up.  It was like an animation of a circuit board starting to spark and short.  My brain was twitching and threatening to completely dissolve like an effervescent frustration tablet.

Fizz, fizz, crackle, pop... SNAP!

I decided that my best option was to get done with work, go to bed, get up early and haul ass to Boca Friday before they closed.  This was going to mean shoehorning a three hour round trip into a pretty tight weekend schedule.  At rush hour on Friday, that 50 mile drive is about a 3 hour round trip so I called to let them know I was coming and managed to squeak in at closing.  Bag in hand I headed home.  I figured if I did the intervals that evening and that days run in the morning after work, I would be golden.

I got home, tossed the bike on the trainer and jumped on.  My entire cockpit was wrong.  Immediately, the left armrest had collapsed, the bars were so uneven that only way to keep my shoulders square was to turn the wheel to the right, and I was far too stretched out.. at least on one side.  Within ten minutes, I was in agony.  Frustrated nearly to the point of tears and feeling incredibly helpless, I got off, grabbed a Park Tool and set about making the problem worse.  In the end, I said "f*** it" and rode lopsided.

Like a lop-eared bunny.  

I decided that I could salvage this with a really solid performance.  When the first interval started, I jumped to my big chain ring to quickly and befuddled my front derailleur.  As the chain skittered around, I finally had to stop pedaling and help it catch.  My brain exploded.  I spun up into the effort far too quickly (I think there might have even been a frustrated Yawp heard 'round the RV park) and.... Oh yeah, I have asthma.  I can't do that.  I can't bolt into an effort like that.  BAD, BAD plan.  I spent the first rest interval fumbling for an inhaler and while I finished those intervals on schedule, they were half the effort they should have been.

Because I was so wound up, it took a much higher dose of albuterol than usual to bring the attack under control.  Because I had been tired, I had already had far too much coffee.  The albuterol overloaded my system and I was shaking like a leaf.  Shaking hands don't do fine motor work.  I ended up giving away a lot of my work that night because I could not produce the quality I guarantee my customers.  That cost me a lot of money, which always freaks me out.  Between the frustration of screwed up workouts and my baby, I mean bike.. no.. I mean baby, being all fuggled up, sleep was a disaster.

The next night I had a fairly long ride and run.  I woke up late, found out I had some adds at work (good for money but now I was short on time).  I started monkeying with the bike... no, actually, a monkey would do a far better job.  I am truly a tragic bike mechanic.  Anyhow, I set about trying to fix my bike by making it worse, frustrated to the point of tears that after spending SO much money and time getting the fit right, I had no idea how to get it back to that spot.  I sent a borderline hysterical email to my coach (I tried really hard to hide my crazy, but seriously, I'm better at wrenching a bike that doing that.)  15 emails later... damn, this dude deserves a medal... I wasn't any closer to a bike solution but at least my training plan for the weekend no longer included 5.5 hours on the bike.

For you DD...

...Unless you'd prefer these.

By the time we get to tonight, and the point of this post, I realized that through all of this, the biggest source of stress was my own insistence that those workouts be perfect.  By the end of the week, my mind was so blown by having to change the schedule so much that I didn't want to do anything but take my toys and go home.  I was having trouble doing the workouts I COULD do, because I was upset about the ones that I COULDN'T.  My perfectionism, with the help of a small band of radicals led by General Hysteria, had staged a brilliant coup, wresting control of my brain from reason and rationale. Negotiations for their release are now in progress.

Get 'em boys! There will be no logic while I am standing!

In other news, there was a point in there where a deep breath and a little letting go might have averted this crisis but that did not happen.  To the delight of weathermen everywhere, this tsunami of neurotic tendencies was able to gain strength in the warm waters off Boca Raton and made landfall Friday night, obliterating everything in it's path.  A state of emergency has been declared and residents of  My Brain Township and The Duck Pond are left picking up the pieces.  No report yet on the amount of damage to training and nutrition.  At the time of this broadcast, Sanity is still missing and residents have begun to fear the worst.

Reporting live: Duckie.

Hurricane Duckie off the coast of Florida.