After Rexy wrapped up I was more than happy to take some chill time off the bike. I caught up on some doctor appointments, rested, and barely looked at my bike for a couple weeks.
Right before Thanksgiving I got my COVID booster which left me feeling particularly terrible for a bit. On Thanksgiving, 24hrs after the shot, I went for my daily ~1mile walk. I was so tired I had to stop part way home to rest. It also caused all my left side lymph nodes to swell up massively for a couple weeks which was… disturbing and slightly uncomfortable.
Thankfully, I felt generally well enough to hop on my bike the first week of December to start BaseCamp again! I had such an awesome experience doing BaseCamp last year that I decided to join again. It’s a 16 week group winter cycling training program. You get workouts loaded directly into TrainingPeaks, yes, but you also get a community of people to cheer you on and support you, nutrition and strength training guidance, and deep-dives into the science and “why” behind the training. Personally, those science ‘deep dives’ are one of the things I love the most – understanding why I’m doing a particular workout really helps me to push through when things are feeling hard. Every Tuesday and Thursday there were group rides on Zwift together led by Tim Cusick, Rebecca Rusch, Amber Neben, and other awesome folks. Plus every four weeks there’s a Zwift challenge ride for the community where you’re entered to win some sweet prize packages if you participate including a 100km race, an Alpe Du Zwift race, a two-day Zwift gravel race, and a time trial.
I took a few days off around Christmas to head up to the charming town of Poulsbo, WA to see my Mom for Christmas. It was a delightful trip (excluding the flying, which during COVID is frankly a giant pain) and involved much eating, drinking, merriment, Christmas celebrations, and a snow storm that nearly messed up my travel home but thankfully all worked out:
In January there was also a Chamois Butt’r photo contest again (which I managed to win last year). This year I submitted this photo playing off a bunch of the typos that occur during the Zwift workouts:
It wasn’t good enough for the win, but it did take home an honorable mention 😁
In February my Dad came to Boulder, which was wonderful. We hadn’t seen him since before COVID so it was really fun to spend some time together. We mainly puttered around town but had a chance to meet up with a cousin over drinks at Rayback and take a day trip up to Rocky Mountain National Park where we got lucky with the weather:
Much of the rest of the season was spent riding, eating, and napping (alongside working our day jobs, of course):
We also did do one race, which I’ll share more about in the next post! But overall it was a solid winter filled with a good number of fun adventures, friends, and families. It also had plenty of not great moments (COVID related stress, a major fire that ripped through neighborhoods in Boulder, some very tiring and long days, and the like) but overall I’d count us very lucky 🙂
