After last week’s athletic malaise, I have returned this week with a partially renewed sense of vigor. I credit this new outlook to not riding my bike and drinking wine. I had the opportunity to see Bob Mould perform last Friday (at the City Winery, a great venue that allows you to sit and eat and drink at a table, which beats the last time I saw Bob Mould [with Husker Du], as I had to stand and get punched in the face a lot as I watched the show) and the pleasure I received from that show radiated through the rest of my daily patterns. I even washed the dishes with a restored vitality, and since I am a bike racer, any extra energy must be channeled into the most dubious of pursuits—pedaling.

Monday November 8, 2010

As human beings, we can only really concentrate on one thing at a time. Studies have shown that there’s really no such thing as multitasking, what you’re really doing is engaging in multiple activities quasi-simultaneously—and poorly. This inability to multitask is not a liability; rather, it is an asset—because as we are engaged in one activity, we forget how monotonous or distasteful another activity is. For instance, in my athletic fugue of last week, I disremembered exactly how revolting it is to ride on rollers. And since my coach (God) decided to make it rain today, I descended to my basement in a fit of delusion to ride for 60 minutes atop my spinning cylinders.

And it was good that I had a week’s worth of disremembering under my belt, as I would not have been able to stand the prospect of an hour underground today. In fact, I think that disremembering how tedious some activities are is perhaps the key to athletic achievement. Simply put, sometimes you have to be dumb to be fast.

Tuesday November 9, 2010

I have a lot of theories. Of course, I don’t develop theories for the big questions like the origin of the universe or the reason for Tila Tequila’s fame, I develop more practical theories. For instance, I believe you can never trust a person who wears sunglasses with white frames, they may seem perfectly nice, but can you trust them? Absolutely not. Not surprisingly, I develop a lot of these theories while I’m riding my bike. And one of my theories has to do with aging and pipe work. Basically, the theory is as follows; as we age, our "pipes" age, and need to be maintained. The "pipes" I’m referring to in this instance are the veins and blood vessels and capillaries in our circulatory system. Much like real pipes, with age these pipes get clogged, they become fragile and they develop leaks. It’s a sad fact of aging. The method for dealing with aging body pipes is simple, you need to "snake" them through physical activity.

You see, exercise serves as the "pipeline pig" for our circulatory system, removing clogs and twigs and other detritus that accumulates in our blood pipes. And exercises such as intervals on a bike serves as a super pig, cleaning out the system at a much greater rate. Today I flushed a super pig down my system by doing a set of 20/10s (20 seconds on, 10 seconds off for 8 repetitions). The experience was nearly fatal, and I struggled to stay conscious, but I was able to average 358 watts for the duration, and that’s about 8 watts higher than the end of last year’s training season. Long live the pig!

Thursday November 11, 2010

Today I planned on launching another pipeline pig down my bike pipes. I took yesterday off to go to lunch and work on eliminating a few pounds of my daughter’s Halloween haul (the nice thing about eating your kid’s Halloween candy is that you get to reconnect with foodstuffs you haven’t seen in a while,  "100 Grand bar? Why sure!" "A York Peppermint Patty, well why not?!", until you finally get down to the candy corn—then it’s time to step away) while I sat at my desk. My plan for the day was to head out and do my first "semi-hard" interval—an interval done at about 5 beats below threshold, which in my case is around 170-175 bpm, or until I cannot sing along to the numerous Dead or Alive songs on my ipod. I went along my normal route to interval country (just north of Ho-Ho-Kus), when suddenly—I RAN INTO A CAR!

Forgive my gratuitous usage of all caps there, it’s just that I don’t run into things very often. I try to ride in areas with as few cars as possible in order to decrease my chance of RUNNING INTO THINGS (sorry again, but once you use the all caps, it can become very addicting). But I do occasionally have to transverse areas where motor vehicles cluster in modest clumps. On my way to interval country today, I was working my way through a clump of motor vehicles, and in doing so, I passed a string of cars stopped at a stop light. I did this on the right side of the cars, which is probably not legal or even very smart, and as I was moving up on the right, a SUV-ish vehicle turned in front of me into a parking lot through a gap made allowed by a driver in the line of cars. Living in New Jersey, I am unaccustomed to random acts of vehicular kindness, so I was certainly not expecting a truck to be making it’s way through the line of traffic, yet there it was, right in front of me.

The collision between the truck and myself was gratefully a slow motion affair. I managed to squeal a bit before the impact, and my shrieking served to alert the truck’s driver, allowing him time to stop his truck. I was in the midst of 20 foot power slide, but unfortunately there was only 10 feet of space between myself and the vehicle directly in my path. I collided with the front right quarter panel in a nearly sideways manner, became separated from my bike and landed on the hood of the truck in a sequence that must have been very entertaining for the motorists waiting for the light to change. After my landing upon the truck’s hood, I took a quick check of my body parts. All appeared to be present and surprisingly unbroken and un-bloodied. I slid off the hood and picked up my bike, expecting to find my fork to be broken like the spirit of a Turnpike toll taker, but there appeared to be no damage whatsoever. From what I could piece together, it seemed like I was sliding sideways towards the truck and my body took the brunt of the impact with the vehicle, before I did my TJ Hooker dismount upon the hood; leaving my bike relatively unharmed.

I chatted briefly with the equally flummoxed truck driver and we both agreed that it was best that we never mention anything of the incident ever again. I continued on to interval country and rode at a slightly accelerated pace for 15 minutes, glad to have my limbs attached and operational.