Someday my race will come

It feels like I haven't raced in forever, and that's probably because it's true. A couple days ago I checked my calendar, realized I have a duathlon coming up in two weeks, and decided I should probably get on my tri bike before then. So I celebrated Mother's Day with a 40-mile ride on the cow bike, and while I've been on the thing all winter on the trainer, I can verify that this is apparently not the same thing as actually riding it on the roads. Everything felt fine except for my arms, which were aggrieved at being asked not only to support my upper body but also to steer the bike and generally keep it upright.

In all seriousness, though, aside from some complaining in the arm region, I was amazed at how comfortable the bike felt. I've been riding my road bike outside for the last month or so, and while it's much nicer climbing on that bike, the tri bike is really just more comfortable for me. I think this is because I bought it after being fit for it, as opposed to my road bike, which I bought from some fairly stoned guy at a bike shop when I had never really ridden a road bike before. You can only do so much with that kind of fit.

In other training news, track workouts for my tri club have started out--the second one is tomorrow morning.  I am going to be all hardcore and also do the club's 19-mile time trial tomorrow night, as part of my crash course in getting reacquainted with biking fast, or at least with biking hard.  I will post if I have anything interesting to say about that. Like if I manage not to come in completely dead last, for instance, which is sort of my MO on these time trials. In my defense, however, there are a lot of ridiculously fast guys around here who just happen to be old enough to be my father. If my father had had me when he was 40.

The rest of my Mother's Day was spent pretending I didn't have a massive pile of grading awaiting me--our finals ended Friday, and I came back from a trip to Ohio to the reality of senior grades being due today. I'm now pretending that the bulk of my class wasn't made up of sophomores and juniors, and that the pile I have left isn't much bigger than the pile I already finished.

After my ride, while my husband went out for his ride, I took the kids to a park downtown for an impromptu picnic. If you're thinking of lovingly made sandwiches and homemade cookies, think again--we went to Subway. And I let my son eat Doritos.

We did a whole bunch of yardwork, by which I mean I cleared out more gardens while my kids played hours of some game that required them to hit me with errant balls a lot. I was reminded again of one of the central unanswered questions in my life, which is this: if we can't grow a lawn to save our lives--and believe, me, we can't--why is it that the grass grows so well inside my gardens, where I don't want it?

Today when I drove Patrick to school, we passed this scene at one of the student rentals in the neighborhood:

(Yes, I stopped and pulled over to take the picture.) Patrick looked at it in wonder, then said, "They must have been celebrating Mother's Day."