The Best Medicine

My current lifelong quest is to solve the riddle of reaching peak cycling performance.  I have no real reason to want to do this other than I like to go on the "race pace" group ride on Wednesday. I want to be able to hang with those guys from start to finish. This has yet to happen for me.  Maybe it never will.

Whether or not I succeed in my endeavor is a little irrelevant.  It is the trying to figure out the puzzle that keeps me going.  It is possible that by the time I'm satisfied with my fitness level, I will lose interest and fall away.  I hope not, because I enjoy the benefits of having good fitness.  But I know how I am, and it is usually about the journey for me more than the destination.

Hopefully, if I ever work out how not to get dropped constantly by the group, I will realize I need to move forward from there.  Attack maybe?  Break away?  Dare to dream, Cubey.

One other thing.  I have set up some parameters to my "training" that may or may not hinder my success.

1) I will not follow a program.  I have in the past and for me, all enjoyment of cycling was gone.  I want some loose structure that will provide me with results but not so restrictive that I freak out when life interferes with my plan.  In my situation, I don't have time for a "plan".

Look, I'm not planning to fail ...

2) I currently have no interest in racing.  This is a shocker to many people, but it goes along with the "life getting in the way" thing.  For me, a Saturday or Sunday can be busy just catching up on things that fell behind during the week.  The truth is, I want to ride the bike hard, fast and often.  If Jill has something going on Saturday at any time of the day, I can usually work in a good 3 hour hard ride around that.  Especially in the Summer when I get daylight before 6 AM.  I can be back by 9 with pretty much the whole day left.  And it's free.

Let's say I decide I want to race.  I need to pay in advance or the cost is more.  Oh yeah, and it costs money.  If it rains, the race will still happen.  This will mean more hours cleaning the bike afterwards.  It increases the chances of a crash and injury or costly damage to the bike.  Next, say the race is at 10 AM in Lincoln.  I usually need to get there about an hour early.  I need to get everything in the car.  So there is a 3 hour commitment (2 hours of commuting to and from, 1 hour arrival for sign in, warm up, etc.) and none of that is racing time.  Then there is about a 2 hour race.  If I get dropped, I spend 2 hours riding alone on some boring road.  So the race becomes a 5 hour paid commitment where I get 2 hours of riding in.

After I get back home, I'm of no use to anyone.  I'm too tired.

So that's a problem because racing makes you faster and I'm not going to do that.

3) Preference to family commitments.  I touched on this in the last one, but when I've raced, I've often come home with the feeling that the weekend was wasted.  I didn't do anything with my family.  The house is in disarray because I wasn't there to help out where I could have, etc.  It leaves me feeling empty.  This is why I say I can race when I clean up my room.  I don't really care about racing when there's stuff that needs to be done around the house.  Don't get me wrong, I still postpone many of those things to get a good long ride in. But at least that whole time is spent riding.  Not sitting around waiting.

4)  Rain.  Rain is the last thing I feel I could be doing differently, but refuse.  Sure, I would like it if we could go more than 1 day in a row without a deluge that makes Noah look like a pussy.  But the farmers like it, so who am I to argue.

Say, speaking of pussy, I was on the Trek Store ride last night and Brady Murphy* showed up still sore from some sort of run in he had with nature.  Monday, we had gone-a-riding on the trails at tranquility and at some point, he sustained an injury to his ribs.  He was telling me that the pain was intense while he was swimming that morning so he didn't know how riding would be for him.  Turns out, he was not bothered much during the ride, but laughing was causing him tremendous amounts of pain.

After the regroup at the water treatment plant, we went to the airport road via the "punishing Brady" route for the team time trial around Eppley Airfield.  One rider, I don't know who he was, asked around if anyone had any water because he was out.  I had almost a full bottle of Gatorade (another of my mistakes - I should have been drinking it) that I offered him and he accepted.  When he handed it back to me, I took a big ol' swig,  a little grossed out by how slobbery the top of it was.  Oh well, I thought ...

As the pace around the airport just barely began to pick up into the stiff head wind, I was done.  Toast. With jelly for legs.

Some time later while I was riding solo on north 16th street, I got a text from Brady that he was waiting at 16th and Burt.

We rode to the U.P. because he had to get his bag.  Then he offered to fill my water bottle much like they do at the National Parks Services.  That's when I brought up my concern to Brady about letting that one guy drink from my bottle, "I hope he hasn't been eating out chicks with HPV and now I'm going to end up with some sort of pussy throat cancer or something."

But by the time I had said "eating out chicks" Brady was yelling "La-La-La-La, I am not listening to you."  Also he was in a great deal of pain.  His ribs.  Yeah.

So next we had to ride out of downtown, which is mostly uphill.  we were taking a very easy post ride pace.  On our way up the hill near Bemis park, I told Brady how I was climbing that hill one day and a lady said, "Hi Phil!"

This made Brady laugh so hard, it was like someone had grabbed his brake.  We were already going slow.  He basically could not move.  It was really fun.

For those of you who don't know Phil, you do.  It's just that his name's not Phil.

Phil is an older guy.  Older than me.  I've talked to him many times and I can tell you this.  I will never ever let him borrow my water bottle.

Up until about 2 years ago, I did no more oral hygiene than brushing my teeth twice a day.  I didn't floss.  I hadn't been to a dentist in 7 or 8 years.  There was a visible buildup of plaque on my teeth.  Particularly the front lower inside.  Then I got the gingivitis. It is a gum infection that causes bleeding and swelling.  That bleeding gum thing scared me enough that 7 months later, I went to the dentist.

After 3 visits in 6 weeks and a painful process of plaque removal that took about 3 hours, I was on the road to recovery.  I now have to go to the dentist every 3 months and make sure to maintain clean teeth.

If I hadn't decided to go to the dentist 7 months after my infected gums started bleeding.  If I had at that point figured, hey, maybe it was the brushing of my teeth that was causing the problem.  If I had just "let them go" and get worse and worse and worse, then I could understand why that woman said "Hi Phil!"

What I'm saying is Phil's teeth are gross.

So when Brady regained his composure and the pain in his ribs subsided and he rolled back up to me, I continued to talk about the woman who confused me with Phil.  I told Brady "So I said to her 'Look!'," pointing at my 'not disgusting' teeth.  Luckily, Brady has also seen Phil's teeth.  I'm not sure his bike actually went in reverse at that point, but it seemed like it.  At this point, it was easy to make him laugh because it was important that he not laugh.

I was conflicted.  I like to laugh.  I think everybody likes to laugh.  But what about when laughing hurts so bad you can barely function?  I think maybe that's why they say laughter is the best medicine.  Or maybe it's penicillin.


* Clarification:  I am not calling Brady a pussy.  I am awkwardly segueing into the story that has the subject (or is it object?) in it toward the end.