Happy 2023 everybody! “But Dan.” you say, “It’s not even December yet, why are you celebrating the new year?” Well, I’m celebrating the start of the New Bike Year (Bikesgiving? Chainmas?), which if you are an obsessed racer type, began a few weeks ago. You see, to be prepared for the upcoming season of bike stuff, the afflicted among us have already started next year’s training plan. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but I follow a training plan that my teammate Greg graciously develops and offers to those of us on Rockstar Games. I’ve followed the plan for the past few years and have alternately praised and cursed Greg’s name for his well-thought-out and strenuous workouts.
The specific details of the plan aren’t tremendously important (and there’s nothing more boring than a bike racer word-vomiting their training plan details)—that isn’t a dig at Greg’s training plan—what’s most important is that you find a plan that you are willing to do. And I find Greg’s plan easy to attempt to accomplish (I say “attempt” because some days I simply don’t feel like doing a structured workout, so I don’t. I’m closer to the grave than most, so I’m not going to waste any time doing something that’s a bummer), and that’s what you really need from a training plan—you need it to be a plan you plan to do.
And doing workouts these days is tremendously easy. They are all posted to TrainingPeaks and through some sort of devilish TSS magic the workout appears on my Wahoo head unit or they get synced to my Zwift profile. It’s almost impossible to ignore them, which makes them easier to accomplish. Gone are the days of writing down your intervals in spiral notebooks and trying to calculate how many minutes you are supposed to spend in each training zone. The computers do all of that for you. It’s a brave new world out there, and it’s no wonder that people are going much faster, they’re using all that time they used to spend scribbling in notebooks to go out and ride bikes.
In fact, I’ve been using all this extra free time I’ve been banking to begin another preoccupation. You see, a few years ago I decided that it wouldn’t be proper for me to live a life that didn’t include at least a short stint as a race car driver. So when a friend offered me a seat to race his cars in a 24 Hours of Lemons race about 10 years ago, I jumped at the chance. And I enjoyed it so much that I decided to build a race car of my own. I found a 1989 Mustang with a tremendously undesirable 2.3 liter 4-cylinder engine (that was inoperable at the time we purchased it—allegedly seized, but I like a challenge) in rough enough shape that it would qualify as a Lemons car (the cars aren’t supposed to cost more than $500).
My plan was to pull the engine, get it fixed and have the car ready to race. Our odyssey began about two years ago (I say “our” because I am working on the car with my friend, fellow race-nut Phil, whose main duties are knowing more than I do about cars and preventing me from killing myself while attempting to fix the Mustang), and as of now, I’m proud to say we have a mostly operating vehicle (and I haven’t died at all). I assume the car drives, but can’t really say because the car runs but it’s not a vehicle you can technically drive on any roadway legally, so it will have to be towed to a location where we can drive it around and see if it runs properly. Those places are scarce around here, so it will probably not be until the spring before the car gets shaken out. (Feel free to follow along with car junk and photos of toppled porto-potties and videos of engines running and not running on Instagram at schmalz411.)
That will take time of course. I’m hoping to do at least two Lemons races this upcoming year, and finding time to go and pretend to be an entirely different type of racer is an extreme challenge, not to mention the countless hours spent staring at parts both attached and unattached to the car as we try to replicate procedures that seemed so easy on YouTube. (Through a comedy of errors, I managed to give our freeze plugs a real world testing and added a transmission removal and installation to our to-do list.) Pretend race car driving will take away from pretend bike racing, but it’s a trade I am willing to make because there I only have so have many summers left, and life is too short to not be a race car driver.
