Starting Over

This time of year in general is difficult for the cyclist. Days are short. Days are cold. Hormones are at ebb tide. Then there's the vast uncounted armies of the viral world lying in wait to ambush your every ambition. So what's a boy to do? Start fresh, start over. Yesterday was one such restart. I was home. It was sunny. I was feeling better. I had gotten the rear hoop on the Steve Rex replaces so that bike was back in the arsenal, so at about 1:30 I togged up heavily and hopped on the Rex for a short leg opener. It was hard.  It's been weeks since I've had any consistent time on the bike, and at my age consistency is king. This has been the lowest mileage, slowest start winter training in many years. but one of the essential features of the athletic life is the stubborn commitment to the future and the ideal of perfect fitness or perhaps perfected fitness is more accurate as you can only be as fit as your biological circumstances allow even if every other aspect of your life cooperates.
Today will be sunny as well, and one good thing about the winter is that my work life is quiet so I'm taking the afternoon off and piloting the 'traut touring rig up Old Stage Rd. to East Cuesta Ridge Rd. This is a very hilly ride, but I'll do it slowly and take in the views - no choice at this point. My goal in the next month is to accumulate enough fitness to do the first Grasshopper ride, Old Cazadero on Jan. 19th - one short month from today. We'll see.

Back in Action

After a full week off due to a head cold I started myself back up with a ride to the gym and four circuits of anatomical adaptation type work. It felt so good to be moving my body in a workout no matter how paltry. I did do a longer workout than normal mostly because Heidi accompanied me for the first time. We rode over together on our bikes through the chilly mid morning town. I was going as slowly as possible yet still distanced her when I stopped focusing on staying with her. I am so used to pedalling along at a furious clip that I assume my slow riding will be easy to match. That's not necessarily so it seems. Also picked up today the pedals for the Freschi tandem so that will finally be roadworthy. I have to admit I'm a little bit trepidatious about taking Heidi out on it. She's such a coward when it comes to mixing it up with cars and with velocity of any sort. I'm also a little nervous as I've never piloted a tandem before. Well it's good to try new things they say. I think I'll take it our solo first for a shakedown cruise and then take H for a slow Sunday morning spin to start when the traffic is at it's lightest.

Viral submission

There's nothing like a wicked cold virus to derail the best planned cycling program. I had a long off road adventure ride planned for last Saturday that I was really looking forward to. Friday I was feeling worse and worse all day, Saturday I woke up sick. I'm now mostly better here on Wednesday, but am still hacking up green goo from lungs and sinuses. It's curious that in the early stages I kept thinking, "Dont' be such a baby. You're not that sick." Now that I actually am feeling a bit better I realize just how sick I was. I learned my lesson years ago that you don't try to "ride through it". That only leads to longer and more severe illness. It is frustrating having the time and the weather to ride, but not having the basic good health. It's a real lesson in how valuable general health is to cycling. I tend to take it for granted, but really should be thankful every single day that I'm well.

Completing the microcycle

It's been pretty well established since at least the mid 80s that training is optimized by 2-4 day cycles of training followed by a day of rest. This is callled a microcyle. These are combined into a macrocycle of increasing length and intensity of training over 3-5 weeks followed by an easy rest week. I don't have much trouble putting two days of training together, but I'm more often than not ready for the rest day after that. In an effort to get back up to peak fitness quickly I'm commited to the 3 day microcycle through the next three week. Three days ago I did the gym and a fixie commute, two day ago I did an hour and a half on the road, and yesterday three and a half hours on the road in very foggy conditions. It was difficult as I didn't feel at all fresh which really takes the fun out of it. Luckily I planned the ride with Karl my normal training partner. I find I'm much less likely to punk out if I'm with someone and we've agreed on a certain length of ride. I feel pretty good today - no muscle soreness or fatigue so maybe it was more mental than physical lethargy yesterday. Sleeping ten hours last night didn't hurt either I'm sure.

Riding in the Rain

I managed one day of riding out of the two weekend days. Saturday was grey in the morning and I made a plan with my buddy Karl to ride at 11:00. Sure enough as soon as I got on the bike it started drizzling and it rained off and on the entire three hours we were out. Luckily it wasn't that cold so it was mainly just nasty instead of horrible. We rode out to Morro Bay and went out to the rock to watch the truly huge swells break over the jetty. It was impressive. I didn't have great legs, but felt tough to be out riding in the rain. As usual it necessitated a lot of cleaning and lubing afterwards to put bike and kit to rights. Of course it also cleared off as soon as we were off the bikes. The only rain in the course of the day was the three hours we were out - typical poor planning and reading of the radar.
Sunday was another matter. It pretty much rained all day. So I stayed warm and dry inside and worked the honey do list down a bit.