My weekend races went a lot like the past Tuesday's crappy performance. The road race was very painful and I got dropped about 3/4 of the way through the race and finished the rest of it with a teammate. The criterium wasn't nearly as painful, but I got dropped early in the race but hung in there until the end of it. My muscles were extraordinarily sore after the road race. I skipped the time trial after the road race, but decided to go ahead and do the criterium despite feeling very hot and tired during the pre-race warm-up.

I'm already getting tired of chasing women of faster categories of mine during races. It does help to make me a stronger cyclist, but the strategy of simply surviving gets old. The problem with women's cycling in the state of Alabama is that it is nonexistent. There were six women for each race this weekend and one in each race wasn't from Alabama. I would like to try some races in Atlanta or Nashville where the Cat 4s are separated out so that they don't have to race against much stronger women.

I'm a little annoyed with the huge variability of my performance from one week to the next. This happened to me in May this year and I took some time off trying to recover. I don't have enough history in extreme sports to call this a pattern, but it is starting to look like one. The last round of blood tests in May did not uncover anything out of the ordinary. So I'm not sure where to go from here.

My team went out to eat in downtown Huntsville on Saturday night, and I walked around Big Spring Park on Sunday morning. I'm impressed with the improvements that downtown Huntsville is undergoing. It seems that a lot of cities are revitalizing their downtown areas. Huntsville has some very beautiful historic buildings and homes. I also noticed a lot of people out and about in the downtown area on Saturday evening, as well as an increase in new independently owned restaurants. Huntsville has suffered from a proliferation of mediocre chain restaurants over the years and it's nice to see patrons supporting some variety.

I'm also a little too fond of Memorial Parkway because some really smart engineers designed it and the people who put a red light every 20 feet on Highway 280 should have taken a major hint.

My grandparents lived in Huntsville for most of their lives before they passed away, so it's nice to see the places where so many fond memories of them still live.