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First, this is Part 2, as the title suggests.  So if you haven’t read Part 1, trust me when I say that what follows will have essentially no meaning unless you take the time to do so.  To make it easier – which is always the central desire of our collective hearts here at Bicycle.net – here’s the link in case you want to jump over and get ‘er done:

http://www.bicycle.net/2009/its-not-whats-in-your-legs-its-whats-in-your-head

So, where did we leave off?

Right, the Sunday morning ride and what might happen today.

Cutting to “the chase,” pardon the pun, it unfolded like this:

- Stray Dog sprinted ahead at the bottom of the hill, gaining huge amounts of real estate and making me wonder how far up the hill he could keep that up.  God help us all if I kept it up all the way to the top.  However, his burst freed me to focus on other things, since there was NO WAY I was going to chase him down when he was behaving like that.  Which left me to deal with Pac Man.

- First, Pac Man did a better job holding my wheel.  I set pace and, as I’d suggested to him during the week, he stuck there.  We rolled up at a constant level of effort as I attempted to assert command over Pac Man without looking like that’s what I was actually trying to do.  During the entire climb I was focused on keeping cadence up and riding to my capacity — so focused, in fact, that it didn’t occur to me that we were actually gaining ground on Stray Dog, who’d apparently lost his steam at some point.

At the final brutal turn I stood and sprinted, hoping to drop Pac Man – which I did, thankfully – and only at the top did it become apparent that I’d come within a few bike lengths of catching Stray Dog as a result.

Summing it all up, I’d say that it is what’s in your mind that counts — as long as you’ve got the legs also.