diary of an Endorphin Junkie

AFM Practice today was cold and misty, with only a little sunshine. Oh yeah, and the weather was about like that too *giggle*

Seriously, I couldn't seem to find my way around the track. The bike really didn't want to turn at all, and the bumps at the bottom of the carousel were causing the front to bounce and impact hard on the pavement, preventing me from getting on the throttle. It took me until late afternoon to get below 2 minutes, and I'm usually turning 1:54s with comparative ease.

We finally realized that the cold weather was keeping the front fork oil from heating up, and thus the front suspension wasn't working at all. Dave's going to fix this tomorrow, I'm going to try and reset/restart on Sunday in a better place.

As I had skipped the 4-hour endurance race, I had all Saturday to relax. My first uh, duty? was to attend the block party right in front of my door. Good music from a band on hand, the neighbors were out and having a good time, the sun was shining. It was all good.

I put up a mighty struggle, but got completely womped on the Domino table ;-)

Next uh... duty? was at didjiman and karisu_sama's house. I brought two of their favorite wines, and everyone was having a good time. bovil, kproche and britgeekgrrl in particular went out of their way to make my evening eventful and amusing, and I stayed way way WAY too late given that I needed to wake up before 6am tomorrow for the races.

So today started much better with a working front suspension. I was instantly down in my fastest times from yesterday in the first (and only) practice session, even though it was very cold and foggy. I bettered those times later, dropping more than a second in each race.




I had problems with shifting again, which turned out to be oil starvation. I think this just brings it back again, that for me to do well on big bikes I need to be a better mechanic. I need to learn and care more about the maintenance. I need to build the vocabulary to turn observations into actionable items. I think that this is actually holding me back more than anything else.