Originally Posted by
Ygduf
In a way I view cycling like a healthy alternative to grinding levels in world of warcraft. There's no endgame amateur racing. You get faster, you win, you race against faster people. All up until you're racing at nationals and you win your age group there and that's very cool and quite an achievement, but ultimately probably not very life changing.
Seriously though, for a while I only raced bikes because I was grinding my category. I almost quit cycling this past summer because I made it to cat2 and I considered it "endgame" because Cat2 races all the same as Cat1, so why need to further upgrade. It wasn't until I refocused some goals away from just upgrading that I was able to get back to it.
I also consider training to be grinding my experience/level. Higher the power, higher the level kind of thing. Probably why I can go out and enjoy day after day/week after week of doing the exact workout my coach planned for me. May seem horrible to some, but I get some sort of cruel satisfaction from knowing I am successfully grinding and eventually it'll show in my watts and/or results. I did the same thing in games, everyone went on quests and stuff, and I was there camping some sort of creature that I knew if I killed a million of, I would actually gain levels faster than the questers. So I sat there, and grinded away.