The boy with the wolf tattoo.

Only 24 hours left until the start of the Bucks County Classic.  A race with a rich cycling history and promise that anything is possible.  In 2000 Tornado Tom Boonen himself raced, still as an amateur, placing second in the race I've been training so hard for.  Boonen went on to win the World Road Race Championships in 2005, the green jersey in the Tour De France in 2007 and Paris-Roubaix, 4 times!

Alright I'm not even trying to create some comparison between the path that I think I'm headed and the path Boonen took, primarily because he's a sprinter, and I am not.  I will also never try cocaine.  So there's that.

In fact, I will not even finish second at Bucks County Classic.  At least not this year.  Six days ago I started running a fever and soon after my whole system went haywire.  I eventually had to go to urgent care and was put on antibiotics for some issues with my intestines.  I can't take chances when there's something wrong with my GI tract due to a congenital defect.  I had to send in the bug bomb to clear everything up.

Things started to feel a little bit better yesterday but I had my name pulled from the roster.  It's hard to explain what this race meant for me, or could have meant for me, and how hard this week has been as result.  But I'll save you the sob story.  I'm in good spirits.  I played my trumpet yesterday, twice.  I bought some valve oil from the local instrument repair shop to play some more today.

I dug into my old chest of books and found my Arban's Complete Conversvatory Method for trumpet. This is no ordinary music book.  It is well known in the trumpeter community that the ability to conquer this book would mean you would have all the skills required to master the trumpet.  Now this book used to always overwhelm me and I'd just flip through and do something here and there back when I was in school.  But I swear I immediately started thinking of a periodization training plan to break up articulation, slurring, and ornament training such as appogiattura into a well structured plan to help me get back to the heyday of my trumpet playing ability and hopefully beyond.

Wow, the road season is really over.  Still so much on my mind.  The trumpet seems like a weird deflection, but there's more to the story still to come.  There's a lot more to come.  A new season has begun.  I'm in a new place.  I am getting healthy.  I am recharging looking forward to some fun cyclocross racing and mountain bike riding.  I am hopeful for what next road season will have for me. Most of all, I'm really happy with what the next six months looks like.  I'm happy.

Stay Tuned.  Ride Safe.