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Cyclops rules nice job hills flats distance you handled it good ride.

Not exactly scribed from the pen of Hemingway, but no sweeter words have come to me — at least as far as cycling life is concerned.

It’s been a particularly long, cold, wet winter around here.  Not just my opinion, but also that of many locals who have lived here longer and seem to persevere with greater ease and less layers of clothing, all things being equal.  As a result, my entire winter training program (okay, 90%+) has been indoors on the Cyclops stationary bike I bought early in 07 (but definitely not early enough to help me with last year’s winter base).  

Striving for scientific perfection, I aped some interval training regimens from this magazine or that, and more or less decided to ride it hard as many days each week as I could.  Like three, maybe four.  That would be in line with the amount of riding I do on the bike when the weather is warmer and the days are longer; except that the trainer sessions had to make up in intensity what I was unwilling to suffer in terms of duration.  In other words, it had to be quick and hard because I don’t mind a two to four hour spin on the bike, but after about an hour and a half on a trainer you start to realize why they call it a Cyclops, right?

Anyway, I got some help from a fitness challenge set up by mapmyride.com, which challenged its members to ride 300 miles in 30 days.  That number actually sounds easy until you consider doing it entirely indoors after putting in 10 hours a day at the office, making time for the kids, taking the wife out once in a while, and occasionally being what one might call “lazy.”  All the more reason to make the time on the trainer count.

For the record, I finished the 300 miles in the first three weeks give or take, and did all of it in a series of roughly one hour sessions of the hardest intervals I could force myself to do.  For me, that’s up to a HR of 181, which amazingly is within one beat of what you get from the old “225 minus your age” formula.  I usually would throw in four climbing intervals of either 3 or 5 minutes each, with two times that amount of time for recuperation, and between those climbing intervals I’d throw in a couple of speed intervals of either 30 or 60 seconds duration, again with 2x that amount of time for recovery [note: during recovery I’d spin an around 90 rpms cadence at a relatively low friction, trying to keep my HR under 150.

Going at it roughly every-other-day meant that I never had to factor in recovery days.  Life already forced those on me, and I wasn’t particularly unhappy about it. 

Anyway, this is fun and all, but the whole time the question loomed in the back of my mind:  ”Is this really going to work?”

This Saturday the weather was dry but overcast and the temps soared way above freezing, tickling the mid thirties, and the guys were going out for forty miles or so because the first race of the season is NEXT WEEKEND — a little training race (whatever that means) in Columbia, MO, appropriately called “Froze Toes.”  Needless to say, we all wanted to see before we got to the start line next week what kind of expectations we ought to be taking with us.

Our usual riding threesome has recently gained a forth, a younger guy who hasn’t rode in group rides very much and is still learning, but peculiarly seems to put in a lot of solo centuries off by himself, got a new bike recently, and lost ten pounds or so.  Now he climbs hills like a billy goat on nitro, and we hate him for disturbing the natural order of things that had me as #2 rider in our former threesome, and now the #3 rider in our foursome.  Okay, we like him, actually.  Just not when we’re all climbing hills.    

I’m not the only one put under pressure for a humbler position on the podium, either.  My good friend Esteban rides a full category above me, thus justifying the great amount of time I spend sucking his wheel, and he’s been sounding nervous and apprehensive about this new kid in town, whom we’ve affectionately called Stray Dog, Mad Dog, and on the Saturday in question I tossed out “Bugs Bunny” for how he continually skitters away and leaves us to chase him down like a pack of dogs.

Anyway, on this balmy Saturday where you wear all the layers you have, two sets of chemical hand/foot warmers, and a coat of vaseline on any exposed parts doesn’t hurt either, we set off ostensibly to get in some actual road miles and to gauge whether we risked embarrassment in Columbia next Sunday.

I had a third mission.  Or was it a goal?  I get those confused sometimes.

Anyway, that was to figure out once and for all whether that expensive stationary bike with the powertap and the downloads, and the pretty charts and graphs on your Mac and all that, combined with my improvised interval regimen designed to mimic what I remember our road rides consisted of before the ice age began, had actually kept me from losing shape over the winter or - gasp - actually made me a more competitive rider.

I felt good early in the ride keeping a smooth motion on the pedals and a proper cadence and actually found it easy to get into a steady tempo when we started up the first rounds of hills.  I felt like I had a good sense of what I was able to put out and sustain, and for how long I could do it, and - shazam! - it was noticeably better than I’d been able to do on the same hills before the sun burned out last fall.  Better yet, at the top I didn’t feel like I’d just burnt all my powder to stay with the group. 

As we rolled along I rode cautiously, staying with Esteban and Stray Dog but being extra protective to not waste energy, lest this early success turn into a meltdown a couple hours hence.  However, when we got to the hills there was energy and testosterone aplenty, and no love lost on any stragglers.  Then on the flats, or as near as we come to flats around here, it was paceline all the time with Stray Dog not hesitating to call out the speeds (”25, 26, 28,,,”) so that nobody felt like there was a chance to ease up.

Two and a half hours later I pulled in the driveway having covered almost 45 miles and maybe 2,500 feet of climbing, and hadn’t once been left behind by the big dogs.

Okay, so it’s clear that I’m now #3 guy in a four man band, rather than “wingman” in a three piece ensemble, but later that evening as I was out to dinner with my family came a text message I still haven’t erased:  Cyclops rules nice job hills flats distance you handled it good ride.

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