Bicycle Racer or Restaurant Critic?

This weekend I had lunch at the new Trailhead Cafe on East Paris next to the Grand Rapids Bicycle shop and thought it was great.  After the week of training I had I am now thinking of becoming a restaurant critic and forgetting about bicycle racing .   Over the past couple weeks I have upped my mileage and intensity in preparation for the Cherry Roubaix next month.  I am very fond of saying “Age is an excuse not a reason”.  I say this meaning that you can exercise at any age.  However, I think as you age you do require more time to recover.  At the end of last week I was exhausted and Friday found me barely able to function, so I have been taking it easy for a couple days and contemplating my future.

On Saturday I stopped into the Grand Rapids Bicycle shop and wound up eating lunch next door at the Trailhead Cafe.  The Smith family are the new owners of the bike shop and the cafe.  I thought the lunch I had was great, all the food I saw being delivered was attractively presented and appeared to be of the highest quality.  If you are in the area at breakfast or lunch time give them a try, I think you will like it.

I have had the kind of jobs all of my life that had me eating out at least one meal per day.  So I have a lifetime of experience at eating and only about a year of this bicycle stuff.  Perhaps I should concentrate on what I know best, eating, and forget about the bike.

If you follow my blogging you will notice that I enjoy writing, so writing about eating would be a natural direction for me to go with all that experience.  Ah, the difficult decisions we have to make in life.

I’ll mull that over for the rest of the day and if you see that I didn’t show up tonight to ride the Rapid Wheelmen Time Trials, in projected 98 degree heat, you will know what my decision is.

Yesterday I had a first.  It was the first time I have been out riding and got passed by someone wearing a Priority Health jersey.  Well at least I think it was the first time.  I suppose it is possible some of you could have gone by so fast I didn’t see you.  If I got the name right it was Glenn Dik.  I was doing what I call my cadence ride where I try to keep my cadence at a certain level, not caring what my speed, heart rate, watts or what any of that stuff is.

While I generally ride alone, I enjoy falling in with people I’ve not met before, so I caught up to him and rode for a couple miles.  He was interested in going faster than I wanted to so I went back to my task at hand, but enjoyed meeting another Priority Rider.

Well I think it is time to go critique my breakfast of oatmeal with blueberries and cinnamon.  So until next time, remember, age is an excuse not a reason.