Exhaustion Sucks.

Wednesday night, the Hardscrabble Singletrack Coalition (find us on Facebook) went out to perform trail maintenance on the triple top-secret singletrack now known as "Blue Grouse".  The trail is basically a game trail that was pretty overgrown, but makes a good singletrack connector from above Catwalk to the east, linking up with the lower portion of Mike's Night Out.  Elgee and Tim Mt. Pleasant went out at 5pm to get started, and the rest of the crew - 8 or so strong - took off at 6pm to meet up.  By the time we hit the trail's beginning, we were already turning on the lamps, and ended up cleaning the entire trail - pruning branches, ripping out deadwood, clearing loose rocks, and building up-n-over bridges over fallen logs, until 8:30 or so.  Blue Grouse still has some pruning to be done, but it is 100% ridable - just needs some traffic.  Kudos out to PFD, Fred, Silagy and the Air Bus for also clearing out some overhang on Catwalk - that trail is rippin' fast now.  Beautiful night - weather was perfect, and you could see Mars just off to the side of the full moon...awesome.  Pictures from the iPhone didn't turn out, so you just gotta believe me.  A couple of Coronas at Fred's garage (complete with stinky garbage with a dead mouse in it) finished off the evening.

The other thing the group ride did was alert me to how fundamentally tired I am right now.  Riding at a stiff (but not over-strenuous) pace up Abrams Singletrack, I noticed I had an extremely elevated heart rate, shallow breathing, and nothing in the gas tank.  Telltale signs #1, #2 and #3 that I wasn't recovered yet from Sunday's race at Copper.  Decided that evening I am going to sit this weekend's MSC race at Sol Vista out.  Only one other person was signed up in my division, anyway; and the race course is going to be the same as USA Nationals, which I didn't particularly care for.  Taking this weekend off will also allow me to get some easy riding in to gear up for the MSC Fall Classic - a MTB stage race in Breckenridge next weekend.  So I've got that going for me, which is nice.

Taking a little different approach from now on in the training front.  Bought a Garmin FR60 heart rate monitor today, and am going to start working with a cycling coach (Alan Christie) to create a more pointed and intentional training program.  Looking forward to it - I need all the help I can get, since I'll probably be moving up to USAC Cat 1 for the 2010 season.

Final thing I thought I'd share with you - while I was at the Audi dealership this morning getting my car fixed (turbo recirc valve replacement), I snapped a couple of pics of one of my favorite pieces of engineering prowess in the world - the Audi R8.  This particular specimen is the new V10 version.  Pictures don't do it justice - it's a thing of beauty.  And this weekend only, you can have one too for the low price of $192,000 (seriously).  I've got my Pearl White R8 on order...