growing old ain't for sissies

This weekend i was fortunate to be able to take a day trip with my grandfather to go hunting. While i have spent quite a bit of time traveling with him in the past this excursion was the first in a year or so. My first trip was when i was 10, my first ride alone on a plane. Over the years we have hunted around the state, fished some of the best trout streams the west has to offer, and the summer before my freshman year of college we spent three weeks driving from Santa Barbara to Idaho and back, with stops in Utah to look at amazing rock formations and a few days in Montana spent fishing the beaverhead and one day spent driving across the state to look at Lewis and Clark monuments and famous battlegrounds of the west.

One thing that has amazed me over the years is how strong he is. While he has gotten a little bit slower, he can still move. While a bad knee laid him up for a while, the replacement has allowed him to keep getting up at 5:30 to go for a swim, exercise, eat breakfast, and read 2 newspapers before nine! When we went out to the blinds on sat he chose the better, difficult to enter blind over the more accessible blinds. And he was the first to hop into the hole in the ground as i attempted to get in without hurting myself. 8 hrs later i struggled behind him on our walk out from the ponds, his step way stronger and more fluid than my own. It was then i fully comprehended how much i have learned from my grandfather, and how much i value the wisdom and strength i take away from out time together.

my friday

so friday may have been my hardest training day of 2010 so far. The day looked ok, circuit training at platinum fitness and then an hour trainer ride with 6 high rpm spin-ups. I got an idea of how much pain i was in store for as i completed our warm up with Eric from foundation roots. several times in our 20 min session i had to shake out my left leg as it threatened to spasm and lock up. With burning quads i joined the rest of our group in our fast paced core curcuit. Frazer and peter have been great at getting the most out of me during our twice weekly workouts. While some exercises are impossible due to my weak leg arm and leg, the two of them have found the limits of my range and flexibility with exercises that continually challenge my ability to withstand the pain and keep up with the terribly fit athletes that are my training partners. After almost 2 hours of activity, there was not a single person in the room who was not sweating out through their eyeballs and grimacing with fatigue. With the deadly smile and laugh i have come to associate with much suffering on my part, a line of kettleballs was positioned across the room. With instructions of 30 sec on and 30 sec off, the timer counted down from 9 min. While i have done kettleball swings before, i have not had a work out like this at the end of a session thus far. I barely survived. The 10 min after were pretty fuzzy, i do remember putting on warm clothes to allow my body sufficient time to cool down. When i got home it was a struggle to get on the trainer. I must have gone and looked at it and my workout on training peaks 10 times before i had a cup of espresso, put bibs on and mounted up. during my warm up i was how brutal just finishing the efforts would be. I managed through the first few but come numbers 4, 5, and 6 i wanted to die. All i could think of was that there is a reason i am here, on the trainer, suffering like this. It isn't collegiate season, not a so-cal crit, but nationals, world cups, worlds, and the ultimate, the paralympics. It may not be this week, month, or even year, but later down the line, when im older, stronger, these days of putting it all out there will be the days that let me achieve my goals. And with my last interval done i collapsed on my handlebars, having given my all through my workouts that day.