Injury and sister visit

No updates in a while, mainly due to just general business.
Bike-wise, since the last post, I raced Methow Valley, which completely sucked. I was hoping to do okay in the TT, as I did at Wenatchee, but ended up second to last. For some stupid reason, I wasn't expecting hills at all. I had a bunch of borrowed TT gear, too, so it was a little embarrassing to do that poorly. I dropped out of both the crit and the road race because of an injury. I've done something to my calf, in the same spot where I think I ripped a muscle last year. And it keeps flaring up as localized pain or as a more general tightness and discomfort in my hamstring. But I bought one of those stick roller/massager things, and I'm planning on going to the Sports' Medicine clinic at UW's Hall Health, so hopefully that will help.
But, of course, I didn't let the injury stop me from doing track, which was stupid. I felt like I couldn't put out any power at all. And I made really dumb positioning mistakes, especially in the 2-lap heats. The 4x5 was awful though, my leg hurt a lot, and I kept attempting to bridge gaps. I should have just stayed pack fodder or just not raced, which probably would have been the intelligent thing.
Some time off strenuous riding should hopefully help me race longer this summer. I really hate
to miss track, but I do know that racing track now with an injury will not really help me heal to race track later this season. I think I'm just going to be doing mainly track for the rest of the season. I'm also pretty mentally burned out on road, right now. My performance has just been so sporadic.

In other non-biking news, my sister visited for the past week. She's visited before, so she wanted to do some different things, so we:

• Attempted to hike Mt. Si. This didn't quite work, as I was injured, Chris still hadn't recovered from Methow the previous day, and my sister lives in Chicago with basically 0 elevation. We got to the flats and turned around.
• Visited Portland. We did Powell's, REI (no sales tax!), the Rogue pub, Mt. Tabor, Apizza Scholls, and Voodo Donuts (the last two both on recommendation of Anthony Bourdain).
• Walked around Greenlake, Wallingford, and Alki Beach.
  
• Made calzones and ate at the Tangletown/Elysian Brewery.
• Attempted to bike to the Redhook brewery but only made it to Logboom Park before having Chris pick us up and just drive the rest of the way because we had started later than I hoped, so I was getting hungry. Also, my calf was a little more sore than I wanted it to be.

It was good to take some time away from the paper I'm working on. And then yesterday, I got to watch some naked cyclists in the Fremont Solstice parade, so, you know, there's nothing better than seeing average people naked on bikes to top off a week.