A Sense of Calm

The season is quickly approaching, and I'm finding myself more calm than ever.  I've noticed a big change in myself over the last few months especially.  

I've been reading Mind Body Mastery - Training for Sport and Life.  It talks about accommodation -- progressively overloading your mind, taking small steps on the border of your comfort zone.  Interestingly, this is exactly what I did.  My bike handling skills used to suck.  In October, even.  But I've made a conscious effort to push the limit every day.

Every turn I've taken since October, every mountain I've gone down, every twisty road I've hit, I've made an effort to improve, to push the limit of what feels comfortable.  I don't know when it happened, but one day it clicked.  Maybe it was gradual, but one day, I was flying down Tiger with my teammates, and I thought to myself "this would have terrified me a few months ago."  In places where I normally would get dropped, I excelled.  I wanted to go faster.  

My swim coach in high school always used to say that overnight success doesn't happen overnight.  I never really understood this until recently.  Now I see tons of people doing the same thing -- training easy from October to January, killing themselves in February, and getting burnt out by June.  Meanwhile, I see myself slowly progressing through the offseason.  I know that my training is not making me fast for this season.  It is making me fast for next season, and I am okay with that.  

This isn't to say that I will be slow.  I'm not.  I'd say I'm equal.  But it's a journey, and my journey is not geared towards being fast for a few months.  I just know that one day, probably sometime next year, my patience will pay off.  Until then, I will enjoy the journey and the daily tests.  I will add these experiences into my foundation so that one day, I can KILL.

Slapped by a Pedestrian

I was doing some hard intervals today in the pouring rain when I suddenly looked up and saw a man and his dog crossing the street (visibility was pretty poor). I was probably going about 25+ at this point, and I grabbed a handful of brakes.

I quickly realized, like most of the time in the rain, that my brakes wouldn't do much good. The man and his dog were taking up the whole right side of the road, so I swung left, hoping he wouldn't keep moving too fast. I started yelling some "whoa whoa whoa"s because I knew I couldn't stop.

Unfortunately, I must have slowed down too much because the dude slapped me! He slapped me really hard on the arm. I yelled some profanities at him and continued on my way.

Paw in Escalator

Erin's family was in town this weekend. Erin and I were waiting in the lobby at the hotel, and we witnessed something very disturbing.

A man with 2 small yapper dogs went up the escalator. One of the dogs got it's paw stuck in the escalator. Much yelping ensued.

This raises a few questions:
1. Why would you get a yapper dog?
2. Why would you bring your yapper dog to the nicest hotel in Seattle?
3. Are yapper dogs allowed in the hotel?
4. Why would you bring your yapper dog on the escalator??

As we went down the other side of the escalator to leave, we saw a toe nail sitting near the top of the other side. Poor doggie!

Aww yeah!

I realized that my last post was no fun without a picture.  I'm really digging the sugar shorts.

New Team Kit

I got my new team kit today.  Sweeet!  

I forgot how much I ordered - 3 full kits, a skin suit, a vest, a long sleeved jersey, arm warmers.

It's like Christmas. :)  The Squadra shorts are nice, but they are short, and they make my quads look HUGE.  

Yeah!

Poor little guy... This is what I occasionally do in my spare time with Photoshop. Maybe I will add more later so his eyes fall on the floor at the end. Now the lighting isn't right. Boo.

Recovery Week and New Phones

My boss gave me a phone on Thursday, a nice HTC Fuze so now I can check my email all the time.  Like most things, at first I didn't like it or the idea of having a new phone, BUT now I like it a lot.  Something about doing a good job with work?  

This week was sort of a recovery week, but not really.  I still did ~11.5 hours of training including 3x10:00 full gas TT efforts on Thursday (averaged 290 watts!), a tempo ride with hill reps yesterday, and a 3 hour team ride today.  Easy compared to normal I guess.  I felt good on Thursday, great yesterday, and like crap today.   

The Spirotiger still makes me wheeze, and it makes my intercostals sore.  I hope it helps in some way.  

Racing starts soon.  If my TT bike comes this week, I will probably do a TT next Sunday.  Otherwise, racing starts the week after that.  Bring on the boring, flat March races!  

Erin ditched me for Valentines day to ride his bike in Tucson until Wednesday.  Lame.

Thirsty

Sometimes, I get carried away.  When I notice that people around me are getting tired, I get thirsty, and I have no problem ripping my own legs off just to make them hurt.  I love having that power, but you know, like spiderman says, with great power comes great responsibility.  I usually end up digging a deep, DEEP hole.  

Maybe this is why I like cycling so much -- because my suffering results in the direct suffering of others or vice versa.  

Luckily, with a huge base under my legs, those holes don't go so deep anymore.  With the right recovery techniques and enough protein to feed a small country, I usually feel even better on day 2.

This week, I am learning how to sprint from the master himself.  It's really the only thing holding me back at this point, and I believe it's more of a mechanics issue than anything.  

Our team ride was really fun today.  Our team is going to be STRONG!

Rollers

For one reason or another, I'd never ridden rollers before.  This is partially because I don't have any and partially because I've only been around them before races, which didn't seem like the best time to learn.

Well, today was the day, and I have to say, there must be a bunch of idiots out there because it isn't very difficult at all.  In fact, it was easy.  I used to hear all these stories about triathletes falling off of them endlessly, but I guess the real issue there was the triathlete, not the rollers.

I feel much better today.  I did some nice sub-threshold hill reps yesterday, and that seemed to shake the crap out of my legs.  We rode pretty hard on Saturday, and 4.5 hours was much longer than I was supposed to do.  I should be rolling much more smoothly this week.