little victories

Yesterday was definitely a *headdesk* kind of day - stressed out about course work and lab work, pissed off at the sunny day while stuck inside, completely unable to make tiny objects do my bidding under a dissecting scope - though thankfully, today was much better.

It started out better already when I met up with my friend Lisa at 8:30 for a ride. After I dropped my stuff off at school, we headed out for a bitch of a hill-climb - up over Dillard - followed by some really nice flat to rolling roads toward the southeast of Eugene. Lisa is way better at riding bikes than I am, and so it was really fun to get to go out with her and pick her brain. I'm sure she was going easy on me, but we did climb the hill at a pretty brisk pace, and kept it up the whole ride.

The roadies around here have a tradition of sprinting for "Stop Ahead" signs - so if you're ever on a group ride and people just start sprinting, there's probably a Stop Ahead sign coming up. Since there were only two of us, we weren't super-hardcore about the sprints, but there were several signs on the course of our ride. I went for the sprint on the first one, only to get passed by her within maybe 3 seconds of sprint. The next two she noticed first, and sprinted pre-emptively to make sure I didn't pull a fast one on her. But the next sign, I noticed while we were still a few hundred yards out, and as we were side-by-side chatting I nonchalantly moved down into my drops, continuing to make small-talk, and then upshifted and sprinted with all my might. Lisa went into sprint mode within a few seconds ("See, you're in your drops now, so I know you're about to sprint"), but I pushed it with everything I had and crossed the line of the sign about 6" in front of her. HA! Life's little victories! We had been talking earlier about how it's fun to try to beat the crap out of people who are in actuality WAY stronger than you are... so she probably let me have it, but I'm going to savor it anyway!

So with a 20ish mile brisk ride under my belt I felt way better than yesterday when I rolled into lab at 10:15, and I was certainly more productive. I may have to start making this a habit at least a few times a week... if not with a super-fast friend, then by myself - then I'd be sure to win all the stop-ahead sprints!