I like to think of myself as a work in progress, of course since I am 43 years old that work is progressing towards a destination filled with decrepitude and incapacity, but that doesn’t bother me too much—it’s still nice to have goals. I find goals and plans very comforting. The world is a place of chaos and uncertainty, but if you have some direction and have jotted down a handy list with some check boxes next to it, the world can suddenly seems like a place that isn’t so scary. It becomes a place you can manage, alter and potentially master.

Personally, I tend to adjust my goals as I go. Some days my goal is to complete a four hour ride by 9am; on other days my goal is to not furiously finish off all of my daughter’s Halloween candy and then bury the wrappers in the yard to hide the evidence (the small mounds of dirt in my yard are a sad testament to my lack of willpower—I blame them on the squirrels—squirrels are such convenient patsies). I put my goals on a sliding scale simply because it makes it easy for me to accomplish them. If I were to list "broker world peace" or "destroy all the henley shirts" as goals (sadly, I take that henley shirt goal seriously), I would soon become very depressed, because that check box would remain empty and would stand as a testament to my inability to fulfill goals. But if I were to add a check box for harassing Andy Shen on my list, my goal would be accomplished nearly every day (but not all days—some days Andy sleeps all day and is unavailable for harassing—pow! Check fulfilled for today).

What does this have to do with bike training I ask in a rhetorically convenient fashion? Bike training is just another set of goals that you can attain while wearing ridiculous clothing. Training is an easy way to get your box-filling fixation fulfilled (ignore how dirty that sounds and instead concentration on the sweet alliteration employed). Go out and ride for an hour, bam, box filled! Do five minutes of hard riding, kerpow, you are not a worthless husk of a person wasting the precious moments of your life. My life as a pretend bike racer helps to convince me that my actual life and in a greater sense the real world can be managed through a series of check boxes. This is nonsense of course, there will always be chaos, mayhem and henley shirts in the world, but with a consistent obsession about riding bikes, I can persuade myself that these maladies don’t exist.

This week’s training can be found here. It’s been a normal week of my regulation rides. I am still off the Kilmer chart, which is a bit embarrassing to admit.

I created a special segment for the most daunting part of my weekday ride, I call it the Ho Ho Kus Death Strip, as it’s a place where bad things happen. I’ve been hit by a car here, got into arguments here and have barely escaped with my hide on more than one occasion. Of course, as soon as I posted the segment, Strava discovered that Beckerman was the king of the HHKDS. Damn you Beckerman!