In the past 2 years of writing my training log, I’ve included a story about death in my last installment. At winter’s end, it seems proper to end the chronicling of my sometimes uneventful and usually monotonous training routine with a story about mortality-as I am also, metaphorically, killing off my winter training. I’m by no means a 9th grade born-again goth vampire that takes grainy black and white photos of headstones for photography class, but I do have a passing preoccupation with “la muerte”; due mostly to a childhood spent in a passive role in the funeral industry. My dad was in the concrete business and one of his steady meal tickets was making, decorating and delivering burial vaults. I went along on many deliveries of the vaults to funerals, and witnessing the business and rituals of the death business made a lasting impression on me, and it also taught me that cemeteries can be a valuable resource for finding free flower arrangements.

But this year, I’m just not up to writing my send-off death story-it’s not that I don’t have more stories of murder and mortality-because I do. It’s just that I’m feeling a little uninspired by the end of this year’s training. The tail end of this training season saw me spending hours grinding away on rollers in my brother’s laundry room in Iowa. And the past week I’ve been in the belly of the retirement beast in Northern Florida, where physical inactivity has been raised to both a lifestyle and an art form. In short, I’m just not feeling inspired to prattle on about riding my bike. Writing is like any other ability-it takes practice. And when I get out of a regular writing schedule, I get worse-er at writing, like a duck that forgets how to waddle. See what I mean? That’s an awful metaphor, well more accurately it’s a simile-but it is undeniably terrible. I can barely stand to type the garbage coming out of my mind, and you as a reader could be justified in taking a swing at me the next time we cross paths. But I have no choice but to gut out this interval of literary ennui, as I eagerly anticipate the coming racing season and the opportunity to write about something other than my own ass planted on the same damn saddle day in and day out.

But that’s enough sanctimonious self-serving self-flagellation from me, let’s talk about bike training, shall we? To be honest, I’m not sure that I will stand a chance this year against all the New York City snow birds that have taken flight to warmer climates in Arizona, California and other sunny locales to log long training camp miles, while we left back in the area are forced to spin mindlessly indoors or risk numbing our extremities in the cold February winds. To these lucky, perhaps underemployed fellow cyclists, I would like to say-bite me. Did you really think that I was going to anything but envious and spiteful about your trips westward to joyfully traipse around picturesque mountainous landscapes? No, I am going to be very envious, and if I were a truly spiteful person I would secretly wish that you sit next to an undercover pirate on the plane ride back and catch scurvy, thereby negating any positive effects from all that warm weather training, but I’m not that spiteful. I only spiteful enough to wish a mild case of the bends on someone else. And all of you are in luck as that would require some sort of underwater scenario that I am far too lazy to put together.

Needless to say, I’m not feeling good about my prospects for the upcoming early racing season. My biggest training accomplishment this winter was that I managed to lose weight in Florida, not an easy feat, as that state is mostly fried.

Here’s how the last few weeks of training went:

Iowa – worked about 14 hours every day, rode rollers for 1.5 – 2 hours a day, wept self to sleep quietly at night.

Florida – tried to not eat foods with descriptions containing the following words: explosion, packed, wrapped, stuffed, or crusted.

And so ends my preparation for the upcoming season.