The Residual Sugar

That phrase has been rattling around my head for the last week. It started Saturday when I was sitting at my computer doing some software patches on my company's CMS. Ah, you probably don't want to know. There are only around 850 people in the world who care about the kind of work I do and we all get together at a conference every October and drink too much and hug each other because it's hard to be a geek and actually like it. We should probably wear costumes. Anyway, it was a slow process so I had a lot of time to think while lots of little files dashed off to their assigned corners. Mostly I thought about how my Echo post was a lot funnier in my head. An old friend who read it thought I might be coming down with something. Carolyn read it and was genuinely alarmed. "You had a medical emergency?!" "Well, no. It just felt like one." "What if it had been a real one?" "Umm, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation?&quo

One of the challenges of growing old is realizing the young you is still in there, growing ever more frustrated with the aging body it occupies. An additional challenge for those of us who race is realizing the faster you is still in there, growing ever more frustrated with the increasingly slow body that it occupies as well. My Inner Fast Guy had a pretty rough weekend at Echo.  I'm something of an authority on bad races. I've had quite a few of them. I could write a book from  the post-mortems I've given myself after my bad races. It would be a sad, depressing, demotivational book. It would also be a pretty thick one. Still, I've learned to take those races in stride and move on. This was different. While I was asleep in the back of the Subaru the night before the race, my old man brain and body had a conversation. They decided I was going to have a nice, easy, recreational ride the next day. They were going to ignore the number plate on our handlebars and a