The fall is here and winter will soon be upon us. The change of season causes leaves to descend and shakes the nuts from their treetop perches, but it also signals the coming of another season – the winter training season for cyclists. And is it here at this precise spot on the internet where you can follow the winter training regime of this humble journal maker, so join me on my winter journey into the myopic and delusional world that is my off-season training.

I must first explain that there are some new features to my training log this season. I am now living in the world of the post-forty year old man, and residing in this world means certain things: hair erupts from your ears; certain pains in your joints never really leave, my aches have become so familiar that I have named them – I call my trick shoulder "Lefty" even though the pain is in my right shoulder – it’s an inside joke, I don’t expect you to understand; and finally, as I have found out, your metabolism slows. In the days before the onset of my forty-year-old decrepitude, I could rely on my gerbil-like metabolism to take up the slack for any of my culinary indiscretions, but now my metabolism has slowed to that of a larger rodent; and with this slow down comes a new challenge – dietary discipline. No longer can I eat without abandon, I must now try and behave myself while taking my nourishment. But I have formulated a nutritional plan of attack for myself. I weigh myself every morning, and if I am above my target weight of 152 pounds, I will eat sensibly – I will not eat between meals; I will try to eat whole foods whenever possible; and I will abstain from any (gasp!) alcohol. So, in essence, I will be eating a healthy diet in order to occasionally afford myself the luxury of boozing it up, a method which I think is also employed by college girls in order to avoid the dreaded freshman weight gain. But unlike self-conscious coeds looking to copulate, I have a secret motivational weapon. I have devised a system for tracking my weight fluctuations that I hope will have either an inspiring or humiliating effect on my efforts – whichever works best. I have invented the world’s only (as far as a quick Google search can tell) rodent-based weight graphing system. I have concocted a matrix that correlates my morning weight to a spectrum of different rodents, ranging from the diminutive pygmy jerboa to the mighty capybara. My goal rodent is the affable and delightful marmot, and any morning that brings forth a marmot on my bathroom scale is a day that begins well.

I will also be sharing my trove of daily bicycle fun facts with you – and here’s a bit of trivia about my bicycle fun facts – they are all deplorable lies.

Bicycle Fun Fact (BFF) of the Day
1868 – at the World Penny Farthing Championships, Eldon Starlingskinner’s handlebar mustache ignites a controversy when his competitors petition the World Penny Farthing Governing Body (the WPFGB – the precursor to the UCI) to have his mustache disqualified as a "wind capturing fairing". The WPFGB rules in favor of Starlingskinner, ushering in the era of speed enhancing facial hair. The era ends abruptly when Alistair Cocktuttle suffers a fatal Van Dyke mishap while participating in the 456 Hours of Centralia race in Centralia, Pennsylvania.

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

The first day of my winter training starts after returning from a trip to visit my family in Iowa – the land that moderation forgot. Iowa is to caloric moderation as Texas is to pardoning – which means everybody’s going to fry. I did manage to keep many foodstuffs at bay, and I begin my new training year as a marmot. No mean feat, considering I was up against a Midwestern array of sausage opportunities – wait, does that sound dirty?

The computer that I use to download my Power Tap data has turned itself into a virus acquisition device, so I do not have the full compliment of training peaks data that I would normally supply in my log. I can only give you the numbers that I can see on my Power Tap computer unit – denying me the sweet reassurance of seeing my "normalized" wattage. Did you know that "normalized" is a training term that means "encouragingly deceptive"? So, the following are my "discouragingly accurate" numbers, which are much less fun.  

 BFF of the Day
April 28, 1906 The Schwinn family introduces the first cycling energy drink, made from beet extract and granulated cocaine. It proves very popular with newspaper delivery boys, allowing them to work an additional 13 hours a day. Subscriptions to Grit soar.

This is officially my second day of off-season training, and my plan for the early portion of my training, or first trimester if you will, is to ease myself back into bike riding. I anticipate a lot of endurance style miles, with some brief bouts of intensity sprinkled in, and like most people experiencing their first trimester, I expect nausea, frequent urination, and darkening of my areolas also.

Today’s ride was an enjoyable jaunt on a crisp fall day, which put me off my nausea, and kept the urination at bay, although my areolas are now as dark as night.

One of the most important aspects of beginning a winter training routine is to look back and reflect upon the racing season that was, and in my case there wasn’t a whole lot to look back on really. My only placing was a 4th pace at a Tuesday FBF race, but to be honest (and to maintain my delusion of cycling-based aptitude – which takes a surprising amount of energy) I was doing a lot of work for my teammate Frank at those races, so I wasn’t contesting any bunch sprints. I’m sure every sprinter at those races was thanking their lucky stars that I wasn’t unleashing my mighty 1,050 watt sprint on them.

This morning I woke to a porcupine on my scale, which is no doubt due to my honey roasted peanut binge last night while watching "Top Chef", but I defy anyone to watch that show without shoving something into their nut hole. So today I will be on my special dietary plan, which involves not eating everything I can put my hands on. And that’s harder for me than it sounds.

BFF of the Day
In the 1950s, Robert Moses required that all his employee’s children’s parties feature a bicycle burned in cheerful effigy, and those who didn’t burn sacrificial two wheelers risked bring sent to Jones Beach – which at the time the most feared penal colony of the day.

Today’s weather forced me indoors for my daily quest for mightiness, I began with some gym-type work, which included some tabata and, of course, schmalzbata. For those of you new to the my training log – and those who may have forgotten – tabata is basically doing gym exercises (or any sort of exercise – like Kegel exercises for instance) on an interval based schedule of 20 seconds on and 10 seconds for a duration of 4 minutes. Schmalzbata is a combination of plyometrics and tabata, which is really not worthy of a separate brand name, of course, but if you can call dealing with a life threatening illness Living Stong™, then I can call hopping to a schedule schmalzbata. Nevertheless, I did a tabata set of lunges, and I did a schmalzbata set of ankle hops. You don’t want to start off too intensely with these exercises, you want to ease into them. The same way you would ease into a conversation revealing you had genital warts – not that I have any personal experience with that – no, really, I don’t.

And speaking of an experience akin to genital warts, I also did my first roller session of the season today. I did a brisk 30-ish minutes.