The end of Summer School

The past few months have been pretty routine. I have gone to school, trained, and raced here and there while enjoying a beautiful summer in Santa Barbara. The past week put my life upside, foreshadowing what I imagine fall to resemble, a full load of school and hard training days leaving me desperate for more hours in the day.
My week started as I went home for three days to hang out on the ranch and see my parents for one last time before Thanksgiving or potentially Christmas. I had turned in my term paper for my plants class two days prior and only studied for my final the following Thursday for a few hours, the others I sent riding, eating, and remembering the joy of target shooting. On Labor Day I packed it up and cruised south, ready for a few good days of cramming before my test. The next two days found me far behind as my teacher dumped another 400 slides on us to memorize before Thursday, bringing the total material to 1700 slides over 17 lectures.
I made it to the test on a potent mixture of fear of failure and a constantly full cup of coffee in hand. I took my exam and spent over two hours recognizing slides and labeling plant genetic trees, and left the exam having received a suspicious text message while finishing up. I pulled out my phone expecting a message from friends to hang out. Instead I found that my roommates had discovered another aspect of living with a national team athlete, the unannounced visits from USADA testers. For those unfamiliar with the United States Anti Doping Agency (USADA), I will give a short primer.
Due to my status as a national team member on the Paralympic cycling team I am required to give my location at all times to USADA. With this information testers can test our country’s elite athletes with no prior knowledge of the athlete. Being paranoid to missing a tested and thus testing positive I am diligent with my whereabouts and last Thursday put that I had my final exam until 10:30 pm and would be home after. Around 9:30 I received that text from my roommate, letting me know that testers were waiting for me until 11 pm. Thankfully he messaged me knowing that the finish to finals are a usual cause of celebration and that I might not come straight home.
I sprinted home, due to this being my first out of competition test I did not want to keep USADA waiting. I got home and started the monotonous paperwork after I met the testers at my door. In theory drug testing doesn’t sound so bad, it’s just a urine sample, right? Well, when giving that sample requires a person to watch you pee with your shirt at chin level it is a whole different matter. Thankfully my levels of modesty are in the basement so after the initial shock last year when I was first tested at road nationals I now see it a minor inconvenience of competing at the national and international level. With a test and class out of the way it was time to enjoy my short-lived summer break, with a trip to Los Angeles to ride on the track before national on the first weekend in October.