Somewhere during last night’s computraining session, midway through the third of five tw0-minute intervals at 85% intensity, a black vortex began to spin inside my head. The normal floaters that flit before my vision were replaced by a veritable snowglobe of flecks and spinners. Still, I kept staring at the green bar on the computraining screen that indicated my ideal pedaling zone. I was not in the red. Nor was I falling into the yellow.
He’d assigned me a load of something like 220. I don’t know what the means yet. All I know is it causes pain.
My body was giving me feedback to compete with the empiric and illustrated data on the screen. And that’s important, because when cycling indoors, you have no other measure to tell you whether you are keeping up with anyone else. The rise and fall of those indicator bars is all you can own. So you train your eyes on them. Like it or not, all your self-worth and hopes are tied to them. You are training the untrained cycling eye on them.
Sooner or later, your legs begin to fail. Which sucks. Because there is no reward for that. The computrainer senses your slowing cadence and the effort actually becomes harder. You ask yourself. Who invented this thing? Yet the sensation is very similar to reality. When you get tired in the real world, the pedaling does get stiffer. So you fight it as long as you can. But there are limits. And I stopped. Let the numbers fall to zero. Then started pedaling again. Everything is accomplished in increments, or it isn’t typically accomplished at all. Next time through you go a little farther. A little longer. It’s just like adding laps and pace in the pool. Throwing an extra interval onto the end of a workout. Don’t beat yourself up about it the first time. Increments. They tear us down, but they also build us up.
Getting back on the bike for indoor cycling after what amounts to two-month layoff thanks to my dead Felt (it’s a garage collision thing, you might recall) was not easy. Nor should it be. It’s a matter of history, record and reality that cycling never gets easier. You simply go harder. That’s an especially vicious truth when you haven’t been riding in 60 days.
You don’t get to begin where you left off. People wise to the ways of the cycling world know that indoor miles are a these days a requirement if you want to ride with the group come March or April. Everyone else is doing it. You had better do it too.
Here’s the thing. Hard as it was, and as much as I dreamed of quitting altogether during the 1.5 hour session, I did ride to completion. That required breaking the two-minute interval sessions into one-minute sessions with a rest in the middle. But I finished.
And by the third interval session that consisted of one-minute rides with breaks between, my legs were on the rebound. The reward was finishing most of the 30-second intervals at 150% at the end. So there was a takeaway.
Somewhere along the way, my rear tire starting balking and slipping on the trainer cylinder. Turns out the tires and tubes on the Waterford, my stand-in bike while I shop for a new one, are really pretty old. The entire bike was a gift from my brother-in-law, and it’s been an interesting bike to fix up a little and ride. But I didn’t replace the tires. The rear was flat when I pulled it down from the hook in the garage. So those tires need to be replaced.
The bike is a specific s
etup. Fit for a Crit, it also has a nice Dura-Ace derailleur that shifts so smooth you don’t know it exists. On the road, the aluminum frame rides smooth and clean. The bike gives back what you put into it. Sure, it’s a touch on the heavier side, but on an indoor trainer that doesn’t matter, now does it?
To ride the bike at all last fall, I played with the setup myself and had the seat height about right. Still, I asked the bike expert running our computraining session to give it a look. He did a little test with my heel on the pedal and it checked out. So that was good.
Because I figured I’d suffer enough without having the seat height completely wrong. Guesswork doesn’t really cut it long term in cycling. During the ride I sensed there is still something wrong with my positioning on the bike. There was no time to think about that. But you know how that goes. Fatigue comes quicker when doubts fill your mind.
The trainer guy came by again to chat during the session. I’d told him I’m looking at the Specialized Venge Expert for a new bike. Turns out he rides the top-level Specialized Venge himself. “You’ll love the Venge,” he told me. “Several guys on our team just got them. And for you, switching out the seatpost will be great for triathlons…”
Then he went on to explain how that works. The hip angle. The aggressive position. How it all works. It was fascinating. “Stop me if you’ve heard all this before,” he told me.
I hadn’t. Even if I had, his words were registering in new ways. It was inspiring, like sitting around the cycling campfire listening to sage pontificating on the merits of Ultegra. “That Venge will be great for crits, too,” he advised.
That’s what I’m after. A bike that pushes me in new or previous directions, and renews the cycling spirit. It was time. Now it’s just the money. That’s coming together too.
When the computraining session was just about over, we did yet another set of one-legged pulls. For me, that was like churning biking butter. Either my pedal stroke need major improvement or my bike position is completely f’d up. I was jerky as a reggae song and pretty out of tune. Out of shape. Out of juice. Increments.
That’s okay. You have to start somewhere. Training the untrained cycling eye takes time. Staring at the computrainer screen through drops of sweat is as good as any place to start. You’re not alone. There are plenty of others joining you in the Sweat Shop, as they call it at Mill Race Cyclery. They’re good people there. Serve every kind of cyclist from barely able to ride to racing like a sonofabitch.
In fact, there are many good bike shops near my home. Spokes in Wheaton. Prairie Path in Batavia and Winfield. Sammy’s in St. Charles. The Bike Rack in St. Charles. Performance Cycling...all over the place. I spend cycling money at all these places. They all carry different types of bikes and gear.
Many of these local locations also host computrainer sessions. It’s a revenue source for some shops during the winter months. Bike shops used to sell cross-country skis in the winter months, but sketchy Illinois winters make that a risky investment.
So this was the first time I’ve been to a true computrainer session, but not the first time I’ve ridden a bik
e indoors in winter. Way back in the 80s when I was in peak running form, the winter months training in downtown Chicago could be brutal. We had a couple years of really cold weather years then, with temperatures reaching more than 20 below zero. So I purchased a MagTurbo bike trainer and set up a Schwinn in the living room of our Clark Street second story flat and pedaled while looking out the window at Lincoln Park.
It wasn’t computraining, by any means. There were no empiric measures to give you feedback. Just your gut instincts about effort and a Talking Heads tape in the cassette deck to keep you company. But I trained hard on that bike.
So last night felt a bit like going back in time. See, it turns out that suffering follows you around in life. All you have to do is open the door and let it in.
And speaking of which, we also got up this morning at 5:30 and did a running workout of 8 x 400 at 8:00 pace according to my companion Sue’s training schedule. She’s been transitioning to a midfoot strike in her interval training and her stride has become smoother. Granted, our legs were both a touch tired from last night’s computraining session, but that wears off after a couple laps. It’s how you have to roll if you don’t want the winter months to be a loss.
I’m sure you’re all aware of 
g so dark and subversive as that.
Show on my cell phone and waited anxiously for the Program Director to answer my call. Quite suddenly, a stern voice came on the line and said, “No Dr. Laura does not sign nude photos of herself for fans. What else do you want?”
And like a Magic Spell from Heaven, suddenly I was talking with Dr. Laura herself.
“But there’s your problem right there,” Dr. Laura commanded. “You’re blaming your shoes for being old when actually, you’re the one that can’t accept reality. This is a clear case of projecting your problems onto other people.
“I already did,” I brightened, thinking she’d approve of the Proactive Me. “I ordered new ISOs from the Saucony website. They were only $105.00. But I didn’t pay for Express Shipping. And I didn’t buy this pair local. Is that bad?”
“I bet you secretly have all your Old Shoes hidden in a closet somewhere!” she hissed. “You can’t bear to throw them out and you’re secretly blaming them for all your problems. I think you’re deeply conflicted,” she accused.
Midway through the 5-mile Snow Fun Run at the Grand Geneva Resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, an intense storm of flurries began to blow. It would have been quite romantic had it not been for the sting of ice droplets on the eyelids and cheeks of those caught in winter’s draft.
a serpentine set of roads through pretty Wisconsin landscape. The roads are smooth and clean when not coated with snow. It even appeared that several new surfaces had been paved even since last year.
In order not to get too lost, some of us choose to exit the main party room and settle in at the main lodge to ordering drinks and munch on after party appetizers.
Then it was time to go to bed and hope the spins would not take hold of my brain after the alcohol. And before falling off to sleep, I briefly prayed that I would not dream of becoming an oversized disturbed rabbit. Or would I?
The corporate world is fond of hardline sayings such as “There is no such thing as a shortcut to success.” That brand of machismo is prized among people who want to be perceived as smart, realistic and hard-working.
That brand of reticence came to symbolize the battle between PC (originally IBM, known as Big Blue) users and those who embraced Apple products. Apple promoted its innovations with phrases such as “Think Different.”And some people hated them for it.
Yet we also want to know that people are not taking shortcuts that give them an unfair advantage in competition.
That’s how the world works, and what human nature craves. We admire the bold and the risk-takers. We largely respect the innovators once we figure out what they’re doing.
See, taking liberalities with the rules is a far different thing taking a liberal approach to thinking. The economy crashed in 2008 in part because the financial industry took liberalities with foundational rules governing mortgage loan investment packages.
Yet there are shortcuts that cannot be tolerated if the world has a right to expect some level of consistency. That’s the truly conservative way of thinking, according to its actual definition. Conservative: holding to traditional attitudes and values and cautious about change or innovation, typically in relation to politics or religion.
avoided that route to gaining revenge for being attacked. Saddam was an easy target, a shortcut to glory for a standing President, and a way to look good in the eyes of Israel, our strange proxy for a Christian nation in the Middle East when it is actually a Jewish State.
We’d all like to know the shortcut or the simplest tangents to accomplish the American Dream. When we’re in a running race, we look from corner to corner on the streets because that is allowed.
Years ago while out birdwatching, a real, live mink climbed a tree and sat there looking at me. At the time, I did not know mink could climb trees. Even with my keen interest in nature, there are still a lot of things I don’t know about a lot of things.
That’s why my brothers called me The Mink when I was a kid. Skinny and wiry like a weasel, I was given to fits of competitive fury. My brothers loved to tease me into that state of mind. They almost never failed to get a reaction out of me.
So it was not without some outside influence that The Mink persisted in my psychological makeup. From the earliest age, I was competitive to a fault. My best friend once told me in 7th grade while playing basketball with some local girls, “If you want them to like you, you have to let them win.”
focus. I began to focus my competitiveness on concerns for equality and social justice. That had existed in me from an early age. I’d dealt with bullies and learned a few hard lessons about how and why they operate lie they do.
The next book I wrote and published is titled The Right Kind of Pride. It is the chronicle of a cancer survivorship journey with my late wife. 
And he’s likely correct that 66% of the time I throw in pot shots or grab a bit of philosophical prey and give it a shake in an attempt to do it in.
What do all these things have to do with running, riding and swimming, you might ask? It’s simple. I believe these activities bring out critical aspects of human nature. They also affect our human relationships and our connections to the earth. So, I see connections between these “traits” in running, riding and swimming and the call to be better people in this world.
So I will admit that when The Mink encounters that level of incremental idiocy, The Mink rises in all its spitting fury, and on a regular basis.
That doesn’t mean I think Hillary Clinton is the perfect candidate either. I don’t like every single thing that Barack Obama has done either. But they aren’t trying to take away birth control from women or seeking to prevent black people from voting. Both Obama and Clinton have tried to act on behalf of everyday Americans in terms of health care access. Obama was a partial success with the Affordable Care Act, but you’ll notice the parts written by Republicans delivered all sorts of power to the health care insurance lobby, who are jacking prices and dropping plans simply because they don’t feel like they’re making enough money.
And that makes The Mink rise up in fury against those types of idiotic motives. Same goes for scrapping Social Security and Medicare. We have a right to be spitting mad when the very people who raided Social Security for money now want to scrap it as insolvent. That’s criminal. It’s an insurance program paid by most Americans as an investment for old age. It’s not an “entitlement” as it has been cynically branded by the very same people who throw billions in corporate welfare at companies making billions in profits. This is a sickness of mind, you see.
But I’m not a germophobe. Far from it. Studies are showing that so-called germs are actually healthy for our gut(s). We need bacteria for a healthy digestive system. Even the bad stuff plays a role in our internal balance.
Perhaps we’re meant to engage with this world a bit more than we think. When we get an infection, our modern day instincts tell us to swamp it with antibiotics. Yet we’re learning that evolution stands on the side of bacteria when it comes to adapting to adverse environments.
We use chlorine in our pools and drinking water for reasons of public health. We largely assume it to be safe, as it has been the practice for decades to chlorinate drinking water and treat pools with such chemicals.
It seems everyone has their occasional 3:00 a.m. wakeup call. Your mind wakes up even when your body still wants sleep. So you lie there trying to find a position that will lull your mind back to sleep. But it’s just not working.
aching for attention. They raise their arms and shout. One even threatens to push another passenger on the tracks. You finally have to intervene. “Let’s all settle down here. Now, you folks there…the Money Worries. The Financial train has already pulled out. We’ll get you on another train in a bit. And you Relationship Worries. Same thing. Stand right here and wait a few minutes. There will be another train coming in a half hour.
comfort.
