Two weeks left in Tucson

It's hard to believe that two weeks from today I will be leaving my winter training camp.  Although it feels like it was a year ago that I pulled up to my temporary home on that chilly first day of the year after driving across the country.  Somewhere around the halfway point of my trip I started to feel like it was never going to be over, but suddenly the end is sneaking up on me.  At the same time, though I'm leaving here in two weeks, the reality is that I still won't be home for over a month, so in that sense it still feels like an eternity!

There are things I will miss and things I won't.  I'm really looking forward to getting back to my old training routes, what with the less traffic, rolling hills and vastly superior pavement.  I'm looking forward to having more than 7 channels on TV.  I'm definitely looking forward to seeing my friends and family again and having near-daily human interaction instead of mostly only conversing with the lady who checks me in at the pool and the cashier at the grocery store.

At the same time of course I'll miss never, ever having to worry about whether or not it's going to rain when I go to ride my bike.  Seriously, 3 months, usually 6 days a week of riding, and I think twice the weather was questionable, but it just happened to work out that during those instances, which never covered entire days, I didn't have to worry about riding in the rain.  I will also miss living 90 seconds from the pool and the lack of humidity.  And these 85-degree days in March aren't so bad, either. Oh, and I am for sure going to miss TV running on central time.  For someone who goes to bed at like 8:30 usually, it's great when prime time starts at 7 and I get to watch some of it.  And watching the Oscars is way more tolerable when it ends at 9:30.  Also gotta love the fact that they don't change the clocks here!

I will not miss living in someone else's place.  It worked out fine, but it still just isn't that comfortable living somewhere that isn't yours.  And having to keep my bike inside on a second-floor walk-up, which at times is ok, other times, after a tough 6 hours of riding, those stairs seem like Everest.  Especially when trying to balance myself in bike shoes while carrying the bike.  I will also not miss the fact that I swear 85% of the vehicles that drive past me while I ride are white pick-up trucks.  I don't know why this annoys me, but it does.  There are way too many white pick-up trucks in Arizona.

So now I just have to finish out the last couple of weeks.  The weather has been amazing, but I'm tired of my training routes here.  I also have to make sure that I ration out the last of my food so I don't leave anything behind because I hate that!  I have to eat a lot of chicken and ground turkey in the next two weeks.  Oh, wait, that's what I eat mostly anyway.  These last couple of weeks will also give me a chance to finally finish off that box of Powerbars I'd been eating that I just realized expired two months ago.  That's not as bad as the gels that expired in November, but I'm not dead yet!