I love family vacations, they’ve changed shape some over the years but I still really look forward to the days where the priority is nothing but spending time with family in whatever capacity that may be. One of our trips this year was to the Outer Banks in January, it’s a gamble but we’ve had really good luck going places in the off season in the past so we decided to give it a go. We’ve been welcomed by unseasonably cold weather, the high one day was 28 so yeah.

This year one of my primary races is going to be the Pisgah Stage Race as I’m hopeful for some redemption after last year’s mechanical on day 1. I’ve decided to enter the “triers” camp for this race so I’m on some level following a 12 week stage race training plan from Lynda Wallenfels that I used for the Breck Epic a couple years ago (more on that in future posts). I backed up 12 weeks from the start of the stage race and the end of the first week of the plan lined up with our family vacation. Crap…not the way I was hoping to start the training. 

Definitely not the ideal situation, in reality a few days off at the beginning of a 12 week plan is probably not a big deal. However, I’m an overthinker, I thought of ways I might be able to make the prescribed workouts happen. I could take the trainer, I could get up really early, I could….But this is a family vacation, I want to relax, have those unscheduled moments, and just do what we do. It also didn’t help that the forecast at the beach was unseasonably cold and the high for a few days was barely freezing. Definitely not “vacation riding”

I do however like to ride my bike in new places and riding around is a great way to see some things you wouldn’t normally see. So I decided that what I would do is start “training” a few days early and get in a few quality rides ahead of vacation and then take my bike with me and see if the opportunity presents itself to get out for a few minutes. Hopefully I can find an hour or so on one or two days to get out and see what I can see from the saddle. It’s unfortunate that I’m packing all my winter gear for a beach trip, but sometimes that’s how it goes.