That's some serious Brooklyn pride.A quick post, a day early.
Upon arriving home from a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend in the city, I got back in touch with my long-neglected coach, Scott Cole. By the time I wrapped up road racing at the Tour of the Catskills, I was pretty much sick of 20-minute intervals, 2x2s, 15-second ramp-ups, and any other kind of interval you can think of. As such, I took a two-month break from my formal training program, and have only talked to Scott in passing.
Since Scott lives in California, we don't pass all that often.
But now that the first races of 2010 are right around the corner (only three months away!), it is time to get my ass back on the program. So, Scott and I had a lengthy discussion about what I've been doing as far as riding over the past couple months, and what I'm going to be doing between now and the first major goal of the year, the Tour of the Battenkill.
Scott can be a real slave driver, and his training program for me is starting out with the worst torture that I can imagine -- at least 10 days off the bike, beginning today. Yikes.
I don't think I've spent 10 days off a bike since I spent the summer of 2006 in Europe, mostly because I really like riding my bike, and my days don't feel complete without a ride. Needless to say, I'm nervous about how this is going to go, but Scott says it's important, so here we go.
2 comments:
Only 10 days?
Back in the day when I made that huge leap from Cat. 3 to 2, I think one big reason others had a tougher time making that change was the lack of discipline to rest when the body called for it. Just listening to the chatter before and after races you would always hear about people struggling with plateaus, stress injuries, etc. 'I trained harder the past two weeks and my time goes down!'.
Cycling's full of overachievers, we both saw a horrifying result of that this summer. The hard part is really listening to what your body's saying and taking it easy when necessary. I always forced myself off for three weeks and skied or swam or something. Made coming back that much sweeter. Wish we'd had Pilates then, that seems like the ideal thing to do off the bike.
Sleep well too.
C.
(Obviously I meant to paraphrase '...my time goes UP')
Post a Comment