I am in the midst of a good plod. My illness of last week has subsided and now I can get to the work of pounding my self into submission by pedaling my bike until I can stand no more pedaling. Oddly, for the obsessed bike racer type, this situation is a joyful one. It is joyous because it serves as the salve that soothes our damaged athletic psyches. If we are working hard, that means that there is a greater chance of mightiness to come. We are quietly vanquishing our foes with each miserable ride in the dark, cold or (most horribly) below ground in our basements. The only thing that would make us feel better in our grind to mightiness would be for everyone else to be sick in bed and not able to train, but there’s only so much advantage one can expect, so an obsessive amassing of mile is the best one can hope for.

In my quest for mightiness, I have renewed my use of intervals to speed the process along. For the uninitiated, intervals are durations of heavy pedaling that are meant to make one stronger and are also employed to ensure that no bike ride is in any way enjoyable. They are timed miseries. But they are also a necessity. There’s a lot of theory and conjecture involved with intervals, and much of it is actually done by people who have done science-y stuff. I would suggest you seek out those people and ask then how you should do intervals. Personally, through a thorough culling of the internet, I have developed a system of intervals designed specifically to not make me hate riding my bicycle with every fiber of my being. For me, this is the first and foremost goal of any system of intervals—because if doing intervals makes you hate your bike, chances are, you won’t be doing any intervals.

I will not be sharing the specifics of my interval system with you because: firstly, I want to beat you (yes, you), and if you know what I’m up to, how can I hope to beat you; and secondly, developing an interval system is like developing a routine for using toilet paper—you’re only really going to use the system that you develop yourself. But I’ve said too much already. Let’s just leave it at “intervals probably make you faster—I do some, and you probably do too.”