Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Hypoxic Thoughts...

I practiced race starts for today's lunchtime ride. Simple plan. Come to complete stop, foot down. Take off. Full 1min maximal effort then settle into another 5min right at threshold. Recover. Repeat until you see stars. These hurt. But so do actual race starts. It's critical to be able to start fast, then throttle back and "recover" back to a sustainable pace. That strategy is faster overall than overcooking it at the start and then having to slooooww way down to recover. The trick is knowing how hard you can go before blowing up to an unrecoverable level. Thus, this workout is as much about learning pace as building fitness.

As my heart pounded, my legs burned, and my lungs singed... my thoughts turned to delayed gratification and it's necessity in training. It's not the physical pain that makes training so difficult. I've been hurt far worse than even the most difficult training days. The true pain of training falls to those days that it seems no matter how hard you've worked... the results aren't there. Those are the most difficult training days. That was my day yesterday. But...I've done this long enough to know the gains will come. Often all at once! Keeping the faith is something worth getting better at, I think. It's a new bullet point for me.

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