The Struggle has been real lately, between a little travel for work, some vacation, and life in general having some time to write has been hard to come by. We’ll get back on track though.
A big family vacation has proven to be tough this year, for various reasons. So we decided to take the week of the 4th of July and have a few mini trips/vacation. With a mix of Vacation Days and Holidays I was able to get the whole week off from work. However with some major house projects we’ve undertaken this summer the budget for travel is pretty thin right now. So we decided to take some mini-trips, camping, visiting family, and a staycation.
This week also falls at 3 weeks away from ORAMM, which is an event that I have a bone to pick with. Last year ORAMM was a disaster for me. I had one of the worst race performances I’ve had in a long time. I came apart in pretty spectacular fashion finishing close to an hour behind my target time. There were some extenuating circumstances that led to that but regardless of that I don’t really want that to be the ORAMM I remember. I also know that I’m not going to think about racing/training on my vacation.
I have been using one of LW Coaching’s training plans as a guide for my riding since a few weeks after PMBAR this year to try and get ready for ORAMM. Of course the vacation lines up with the last two weeks of high intensity quality raining. I really didn’t want to miss out on some of these sessions as they felt like the last real good prep that might make some difference but as I mentioned before, vacation is not “training time”. With that having been said, I would take a bike since I try pretty hard to take a bike everywhere.
Our first stop was camping, Katie had found a pretty neat camping spot at Snaggy Mountain. Which was an AirBnB/Hipcamp camping spot. This meant it was a little more private than most and there was some property around ripe for exploring. As luck would have it we were actually able to get the youngest to nap a little on Sunday Morning. So I decided I’d put Lizzie on the MacRide and do some exploring. After pedaling a little bit I realized we had some good country roads and a few minutes so I put in a few intervals. Adding 35 pounds to your bike makes high intensity intervals easier to hit and Lizzie actually seemed to have some fun with it. Asking “Why are you breathing so hard…” and “Faster!!!”. We also went in search of Blackberries and checking out all the little trails. It turned out to be both a good workout and a lot of fun. I was also able to give Katie a few minutes to rest while Chris slept.
From our camping excursion we headed to Kentucky to visit my Mom. It was going to be a pretty quick trip so I didn’t really want to spend much time away from everyone but I did want to try to get just a little spin in. Again I had intervals on the schedule, I had moved some rides around to keep shorter and potentially achievable workouts during vacation. Once we got the youngest down for his morning nap I headed out to knock out a few hard efforts and pedal some. I kept this one really short since It wasn’t a family event of any sort.
We came back home mid-week to spend a little time around our house and have a little bit of a stay-cation for the rest of the week. This didn’t necessarily mean we were going to come home to business as usual. The idea was still to stay a little more “vacationy”. Even though a few of my “workouts” wanted to be a little longer I decided I’d keep them all early morning to limit any impact on family time. I was able to work in some good hard and really fun rides in and most of the time I was back by 7:30 am just when the house was waking up.
We did take some time to work on a few yard projects and finish up some things we were trying to get done around the house. In that regard there was some “business as usual” but all and all we tried to do some things that were out of the ordinary. We went out chasing waterfalls both Saturday and Sunday. The timing of these activities is a little tricky right now as we’re in that odd phase of the almost 1 year old’s sleep schedule. If he doesn’t get some of that sleep the whole day can quickly get to be an interesting game of how to make the 1 year old less angry but we made it happen.
I know that some people would question “Why even consider making the effort on vacation time?” Honestly, I think its personal preference. For me there are a few things, first I enjoy working towards goals, second I really do like riding my bike, and finally I felt like I could make some things happen keeping in line with the goals of the trip/vacation. I never really felt like I was training so to speak, I was just riding my bike. The ride with Lizzie was even much more of just something to do with Lizzie where I happened to put in a little effort.
At the end of the week I was able to get in some good fun bike riding and have very little impact on vacation.
