Bethel Spring Series - pre Circuit Francis J Clarke

It's almost 2 AM on Saturday and I'm online. Ugh. Normally I've been asleep for three or four hours by now. Not tonight. Tonight, tonight, tonight... Oh Lord.

No. Tonight I'm finishing up preparations for Round Two of the floor refinishing in the house.

Problem is that I started preparations for Round Two tonight as well.

Oh Lord.. (sing with me now).

Yeah I'm tired.

I've cleared out a lot of the living room and the office room. I still have to move three heavy pieces of furniture (two desks and the heaviest hutch in the world) and tear up a rug and the nail-y wood under it in the office so the floor guys have a floor to work with tomorrow. Well, in six hours to be precise.

I'll make it. It's like when you bonk on a long ride, you have no money, and you have 20 miles to go. And your cell phone died. You make it. You focus on making it. You just plod along at some tempo you could sustain for the next day or two. Your body goes into survival mode. And when you're in survival mode, your priorities become very clear.

I feel like that now. I've been working on emptying the rooms for about seven hours now, after a long day at the office. I figure I have two to three hours to go. My other half is incredibly ill, and as an accountant, she has to work Saturday and Sunday. So she's been asleep after gamely helping with some of the big stuff we had to move - dresser, armoire, bed, reassemble fridge cover thing, and picking up dinner.

After seven hours though I needed a break. I came downstairs (where the computers are now) to hack away for a few minutes and share my aches and pains with everyone out there. And worries.

Sunday there's supposed to be rain, heavy at times. 90% chance of rain. Cloudy in the morning but at some point it's going to dump. It's the last race of the Series. GC battles. Podium awards. Trophies. Doing this in a torrential downpour just won't be fun.

And staying up till 5 AM or so today isn't going to help.

A big thing weighing on my mind is my basement sprung a leak in the last year. So when it rains a lot, parts of the basement get wet. Those parts include the part the computers are in. My bike and bike gear. And some boxes from Round One of the floor refinishing project. And if I'm at the race, I can't be looking after the basement here.

So part of my prep has been to move that stuff somewhere safer. Higher ground for the most part. So lots of trudging up and down stairs.

Tomorrow I have to pack the van up, get my bike and gear ready, run a couple vital errands (one is getting concrete sealer and sealing what I think is the source of the water in the basement), and drive up to my family's house where I'll be spending the night (no floor fumes for me, thank you).

The way I feel now, I may not even race on Sunday. Not only am I exhausted right now, I'm totally out of contention for the overall, we'll be short handed, and I figure I'll have to work pretty hard on drying the basement when I get home.

And from a racer point of view, I've managed to ride about two hours in the last two weeks.

Of course it's easy to say that I won't race when I'm exhausted. But the excitement of race day will probably motivate me to ride.

We'll see.

In the meantime, I hear some desks calling my name.