A Search For (My) Life

I discovered something today. After all this endurance training, especially in sports that are somewhat new to me, my pain threshold has changed. Not really increased, but I’ve noticed that I view pain differently. I look at it more as a signal rather than an alarm. If something hurts, it seems like a signal to acknowledge, than move on. I’m not yet sure if this is a good thing or a bad one, but I’m guessing it will help a bit on race day.

I recently moved, and I now live in a house on a very steep hill. So steep that I’ve bit the dust multiple times just trying to get on my bike. Today, I took the day off, but in the end decided to go for a short ride with my roommate. He was having some trouble on the hill as well, so after riding down, I turned around and started back up it to see how he was.

I then discovered that I had no option to turn around again,(really, it’s VERY steep), and I couldn’t get out of the clips to stand up while still on the hill, so I had to just keep climbing up. Eventually I tried to bail out into a semi flat driveway, but ended up slipping, falling, and gouging leg with the bike gears, which I’ve learned are quite sharp. Not only did I have to clean my leg of all the bike gear gunk, but then I had to clean my bike gears, as they were covered with ‘leg gunk’. Yuck.  Maybe this is why bikers shave their legs.
My roommate tried to help with some sort of extremely painful “stop the bleeding” spray. Here are my lovely before and after shots.