And now for a bit of dirt

I am currently sitting in a hotel room in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, prepping for another half Ironman this weekend. It feels a little unreal given that last weekend, I was out on the Olympic peninsula on my fully loaded mountain bike with Komorebi.

The weekend before a race is supposed to be all about rest; certain schlepping camping gear up and down trails, and then hiking 2 miles awkwardly carrying bike bags to a campground counts as rest, right?

On 101 before 10 miles of traffic-free roads along the Elwa

The nice thing about riding with Komorebi is that it’s all about having fun and enjoying the experience, so it took us all day to ride 20 miles of rolling single track. Both days ended in a cold rain, which isn’t ideal when you’re trying to keep yourself healthy and rested. However, both days also ended in hot water; the first night we stayed at a campground with hot showers, and the second night we stayed at a primitive wilderness campground near hot springs, which were very restorative.

See all my photos on Flickr here.

As slow as we rode with as many breaks as we had, I still felt tired and achy when I went out to run on Tuesday. 2 weekends ago I had the pleasure of finally running somewhere other then Leif; okay, it was still forest park but at least we ran actual trail. Unfortunately there was a lot of descending, which of course I took way too fast. My knees and hip were in absolute agony and I don’t think I’ve recovered fully from that. I also was still trying to get rid of that saddle sore I got the weekend I got my new bike, and it ended up torturing me the entire bike packing trip. Thankfully it’s mostly gone at this point.

I got my bike fit on Monday, and it feels 1000% better, and I’m focusing on stretching and foam rolling and getting my quads to release my knees a bit. Hopefully by Sunday I’ll be good to race, since I that’s what I’ll be doing.

Looks way better then last time