By Neil Bezdek
My hands ache. My butt hurts. My legs feel like Jell-O. I have a sunburn. And I’m hungry all the time.
What a relief!
Adjusting to the off-season can be tough for cyclists. It is for me. Training, racing, and traveling fill all but two months of the year, occupying my time and thoughts with a sense of purpose and adventure. But when these activities subside, idleness takes their place. Like a partygoer who suffers the consequences after a night of revelry, the fall and early winter are when I come to terms with a one-dimensional lifestyle, and the fact that home is not a place but a concept.
Fortunately, those days are long gone. With my first races coming up in March, I’ve temporarily relocated to a warmer climate and will train more this month than any other time of year. And the change in pace is welcome. I think of it as a full-time job. I clock in five days a week and work all day long on my bike. Each day I set out with two goals: to ride for a certain amount of time, and to complete a specific workout somewhere within that timeframe.
Today, for example, my task is to complete three intervals of twenty minutes each, each at a specific intensity. That will demand only about 90 minutes of today’s six-hour ride, which I’ll get out of the way early after a leisurely warm-up. Then I’ll fill the rest of the time by exploring the desert. The day will also include a proper lunch break, which usually involves filling water bottles at a gas station and eating a sandwich while sitting on a curb.
After each shift of work, I tally up the hours and submit my timesheet to the boss, that is, upload a power file and send it to my coach. The hours add up quickly: I logged 30 last week and will aim for a modest increase beyond that for the next two. That’s good enough for government work!
Compared with many of my co-workers, I’m putting in some long hours. Some tell me that training so much isn’t necessary, and even though I disagree I don’t really care. Sure, most of this training has a purpose—my objective is to be as strong as possible so I can race as effectively as possible. But that isn’t the only reason I train like this, and this is where the training-as-work analogy breaks down. I train a lot because it’s fun, and racing professionally gives me an excuse to do so.
Last week, Bill Strickland wrote on his blog, The Selection, that he prefers not to train because it’s more fun to ride bikes just for the sake of it. And then Selene Yeager aptly responded on her Fit Chick blog that the virtue of training is that it takes you somewhere, without necessarily requiring a strict set of constraints on how you ride.
I share both views, but in my case I might take it even a step even further. I’ve committed to racing because it’s a means to a surprising end. To train.
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Related: Motivation Tricks