Hours of my life I won’t get back
I might be talking about Philly with that line, but I had bigger problems today.
My MacBook battery seems to be on its last legs. I ran the battery all the way down and back up again to calibrate it, but there was no joy. Essentially my computer thinks there’s no battery left when it’s still half-full, and resets without warning when not plugged in to the AC adapter.
This in turn has led to random crashing of Parallels while I’m running Vista and WKO+, the net effect being that my Windows machine stopped starting up while I was on the road last week. Naturally, I hadn’t taken the portable drive I normally back up to every day with me, nor did I have the Vista install disk with me either.
So after racing about 3.5 hours of Philly, until I felt like I was wearing a full-face motorcycling helmet and pedaling with my hands, I drove 5 hours home and wrestled with my computer until 3 am. I was up at 8 and back at it, until Janice and I left at 9 to head back up to her place in Portland, Maine for the week. Instead of riding or coaching, I spent my day trying to make my computer work.
Here’s how I solved it: I was able to start up from the Vista disk, but could not repair the start up issues. I did a clean install and prayed that the old OS data would still be there the way it is on the Mac. It took me a while to find it, but it was there, and I was able to track down all the old WKO+ files.
What I didn’t want to have to do, however, was reinstall all the software and have to bother Hunter at CyclingPeaks for a new serial number. Instead, I copied all the WKO files to my Mac desktop from the PC side, started up the most recent back up I had from before my last trip started, made sure that was running OK, and then imported the WKO files I needed back into that version of the PC. Voila, c’est bon. It only took me a few attempts to figure out it would work and get the order of operations correct to pull it off.
How would you have done it?
Philly went just like all the reports said it did. I had free reign from the team to get myself to the finish, but with that heat, it didn’t matter how good my legs were. I couldn’t lay in the shady grass under a tree doing nothing but relaxing for 6 hours in heat like that and survive. There was no way I was going to be able to pedal my bike for that amount of time. We weren’t even going that hard, I’m not an efficient enough human being to take in more fluid, electrolytes, and calories than I burn. I just pay too high a cost for cooling in those conditions, and I was not long for that race. 85 miles or so and I was cramping and on my way to the team car.
Next up: Harlem. Love that race. Love.
