If you don't use it, you lose it

But, if you overuse it, you'll lose it too.

I'm talking about fitness of course. After my race at xc provincials I figured that that was my peak, along with Elliot Lake but misfortunes had me out of both races, but I feel like I'm still getting stronger as the weeks progress. It was hard to judge my fitness during the 2 weekends off racing using only the Tuesday nighters but I knew I wasn't loosing anything. Had confirmation of that on the weekend and I know that if I would have raced the marathon a little smarter or knew how to handle my cross bike a bit I could have done a bit better, but there are always millions of "what ifs".

I'm most likely being a little too cautious right now with training but I guess it's better than what I did in April. I couldn't get out of bed earlier than 11:30 today and when I was finally up it felt like I had only slept 4 hours, not a good day to train. It's almost 10 now and I'm pretty much ready for bed, maybe it's just my system trying to fight all the new bacteria that was introduced to my body during the first few days of school. Either way, it's all about learning, trying to figure out what the happy-medium is for myself when it comes to trying to maintain peak fitness, even just trying to figure out if you've peaked or are peaking. If I don't push hard enough then there will defenitely be some loss in fitness and I know all too well what happens when you push too hard.

So I was giving cross some thought, maybe I'll give it a good go and not just a go. I spent all season looking forward to the next one and having the "I just wanna get this one over with" attitude but now that I'm happy with how things are going I'm starting to look at things more from weekend to weekend. It saddens me to think of the whole season as a throw-away and how much fun I could have had if I would have trained alot smarter. It's an awesome feeling to be super-pumped for a race, do well in it, then before you're even recovered from it you're already so pumped for the next one. So I'll go hard for cross, I'm not going to invest nearly as much money as I have on xc and road, maybe it's just that I can't because it's all going to educational purposes at the moment but I'll gor hard from a training perspective. I feel like I've got alot left to give for this season and I won't be satisfied if I end it now.

Heading out to Port Hope tomorow with De Cal, apparently the conti breakfast at the hotel has a waffle machine, I'll be all over that. A 100k mountain bike race should burn at least 10 giant waffles, maybe I'll have 11 just to be sure. I know I don't have to say it but... stoked!

A few pics from Jump the Cheeseburger, courtesy of Dr. Cheung (ok, stolen from Flickr);