- Then today I rolled out for three hours solo. Since I was missing the Devil's Backbone ride this weekend, I told Gros he could beat me into the ground. Ask, and ye shall receive, apparently. After warmups, it was 3x15 minutes of muscle tension drill - that's big ring, small cog, 70 RPM, and around threshold wattage. Up and downhill. It's an insane workout because you're pulling just below, at or above threshold the whole time, trying to keep your RPMs steady. Meanwhile your legs are *screaming*, it feels like you're not going anywhere because your cadence is just loping along... and you've been averaging 25.6 for the last 12 minutes. So that was the first 90 minutes. Then it was rest then 5x3 minute muscle tension drills - same thing, but keeping it at threshold. Which in reality means 110% of threshold. Same thing - pedaling slow, this time heading north with a headwind assist - legs just in agony, back and hammies on the brink of a massive cramp, and grinding it out at speed. My ass was cramping too. It was madness. Then in the third hour... at this point I was limping home, so it was low to middling zone 2, with some work in the middle. Every 5 minutes or so, I did a 1 minute spinup, or I tried to. That's where you take the cadence up as fast as it will go and hold it there, shifting gears from time to time to keep the cadence high. 486, 526, 537, 535... but I couldn't keep that up for a minute. I was so spent I was getting 45-50 seconds and going into a huge hip/ass cramp. Didn't help that I was going uphill most of the time doing these. Painful. I finished off with about 2:40 of riding time, average wattage of 218 (Man, I love me some 218, don't I?) and an NP of 268, lower than yesterday because I wasn't doing for-real sprints. The IF was .85 - a little easier than yesterday but still a really demanding workout.
- I'm throwing all those details about my workout out there because I'm happy. The training is starting to come together again, and I'm on top of the pedals enough and fit enough to be doing some harder, complex workouts. It feels good. My friggin' legs are fried tonight, and I'm grunting as I walk up and down the stairs, but that's okay. I am just grateful for the chance to train and improve myself. It looked in doubt this spring but I'm getting a chance to do it right now. This may hurt but I'll take what I can get.
- What is the alternative? Senescence. Obsolescence. Death. Not that death is necessarily a terrible thing. It's just a part of life, the last part for most of us. But most of us don't like to be reminded that the Eternal Footman is at the door, waiting to hop our bags and see us into the incorporeal stagecoach. Not everybody has the same relationship with death, however. Michael Ledeen - a guy whose politics you may hate but who is admittedly a first rate thinker and Italophile, writes about the Neopolitan relationship with death and spirituality in First Things. The article is a take on Naples' unsanctioned cult of saints and miracles, which seem very unchanged from the high middle ages. Ledeen points out that being aware of death is a part of life for Neopolitans, and that knowing your time is limited and that there are a lot of things that you don't know may be one key to being more creative and energetic. He argues,
I think the vagueness of the boundary between the living and the dead has a lot to do with the ongoing creativity of the city. It eases anxiety about death—in the contemporary world, an enormous and largely unspoken fear that stifles the range of thought and art. The Neapolitan ease with the dead reminds the living that they are part of a continuum, and it gives them the faith to believe that their own identity and their own endeavors will continue after they have passed on. It makes it easier for them to maintain their connections with their own history—which so many contemporary Europeans and Americans increasingly ignore or falsify in the interests of current political fashion.Yes, I think I've seen something of that among the Irish. Anyhow, it's an interesting article and it reminded me of reading Chaucer and Boccacio, with those writers' earthy acceptance of natural processes.
- Speaking of life or death questions - Greg Keller takes on Joe Friel's ponderings about whether one should race cyclocross at all. Friel's take: Useful if you're trying to get ready for an "A" event in January but otherwise it takes too much out of you. Greg's take: What? Hells yeah race cross - it ain't training, it's a sport! My take is close to Greg's detailed discussion. You can focus on cross as your main racing activity. Or you can use it as a mental recharge from a long season of training and road or MTB (or track) racing, and just use it to have a shit ton of fun. Your call. The main thing is to have fun with it. Go hard, but keep it light no matter what. That cuts way down on the burnt matches that Joe Friel is so concerned about.
- In keeping with that, I'm trying a whole new approach to cross this year. It involves fixing a couple of my weaknesses - general fitness / fatness, and the need to ride volume to keep myself in balance across all areas of my life. In short, it's quite possible to get fat riding 6.5 hours per week on the regular cross in-season training schedule. It's also impossible to burn off the non-training Training Stress Points that accrue due to daily work and life stress, a pile of angst that builds up into a mountain and wears me out if I don't ride 90 minutes a day. As for the pure training aspect, I'm a big dude. I get plenty of anaerobic work just riding around. *Every* hill is a red zone workout for me, so I'm not going to miss doing 2-3 days of high intensity intervals during the week. One day of intervals, yes. But otherwise it's going to be L2 or L3 (tempo) rides to raise my general fitness throughout the season. Practice will be a once every week or two experience. I'll let you know how it goes.
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