mattm

He drives a minivan too.

Racer Ex 

Love it. Won it.

SStang: there is always someone better than you in this sport. There will always be a race where you get your ass handed to you. Every racer has a passport stamped by The People's Republic of Offthebackistan. The top 10% of any Cat 5 race could lay waste to 99% of the biking population.

Know that the guys who make it look easy are a bundle of insecure, self doubting head cases who get to answer "so why didn't you win" when they finish 2nd to a guy who went to the Olympics twice.

The reward is looking in the mirror and going "I did the best I could". You know when you're lying to yourself and you know when it's true.

Shoot for the latter.

Racer Ex 

You mean "too" as in "Racer Ex drives a minivan" or "He kicked my ass and by driving a common vehicle has made me reassess my materialistic valuation of people based on their purchase of a marketed image instead of actual substance"?

Or "Wow, you can fit a lot of stuff in one of those"?

mattm

yes

Racer Ex 

Just as I thought.

revchuck 

Yeah, but they've offered me citizenship...

rankin116

I like this.

shovelhd

I like this.

ovoleg

Driving up to do the Death Ride in NorCal now...kinda wish I stayed longer in socal to ride around my hood but big mountains await!

globecanvas

I decided somewhat last minute to race tomorrow, at the end of a hard build week. I won't have a chance to taper at all of course. It is what it is, I'm not dwelling on it, but it got me to thinking about something.

The CTL/ATL model assumes that each workout affects your fitness and fatigue immediately. Your fitness is affected only a little bit, and the effect wears off slowly; your fatigue is affected much more, and the effect wears off quickly. This makes intuitive sense for fatigue, but not necessarily for fitness. It almost seems like CTL should be calculated several days in the future, or to put it another way CTL should not take into account the most recent few days of training.

In other words, if I were able to magically erase fatigue, would the workout I did yesterday make me stronger today, or make me stronger next week?

To forestall some possible replies, yes the question is of academic interest only, and the model is not supposed to be a complete description of human physiology. I'm just curious whether the human adaptation systems are more continuous once you reach a certain level of constant training load, or more delayed.

sstang13

This is great, thanks!

Fat Boy

You had the opportunity to practice the mental stuff and didn't. If you're within a few bike lengths, then get your ass off your saddle and close that gap! Once you get the draft the next 30-60 seconds isn't going to be any picnic, either. You're going to hurt. You're also going to recover. Once you recover, you'll feel better. Make up your mind to make it happen.

This is not an easy sport. Joining a 5-man paceline and 'taking your pulls' is fine recreation, but it's not going to make you any faster. Getting in with guys that are clearly faster with you and riding your balls off to stay with them will.

waterrockets 

+1 (except for the "balls" part)

mattm

To me it sounded like stang did a better job of suffering than previously. Either way, there is always room for improvement.

TMonk

One of the worst feelings is crossing the line with bad placing and plenty of legs left.

TMonk

Well I done neglected my body and now my knee issue has flared up a little bit (happens a couple times a year). Oops.

I think it was a combo of zero cooldown after a hot finish to a 35lap points race tuesday, followed by being generally lazy about my stretching for the past few weeks. The lame part is that last week was a rest week, and now im looking at another "rest week" just so I can let my quadriceps tendon cool down a little bit.

Good job dumbass.

Creatre

Been there done that a couple months ago. Sucks.

Just make sure to let it rest and fully heal and don't make it worse by dragging it out by getting back too fast like I did!

TMonk

oh i know. i first developed the problem about 3 years ago, and it's mostly under control. I just have to stay on top of my recovery/stretching game.

sometimes I get too lazy and then I have to pay the price of taking a couple weeks easy. sucks because I have so much energy to spare and my legs are ready for battle...

thx for the tip though.

sstang13

Ya very true, but that was honestly the only true moment of suffering that I had all night. If anything that ride hurt, it would just be some pain in my legs on hills and corners and such but nothing that I had to really dig deep for mentally. It kind of sucks that I didn't get a lot of those moment's that night (before or after the one I had) because I do need a LOT of practice with it, but at the same time it's nice to see that I was able to keep up with them for more than double the time of any other ride I've done with them and still feel like I had some energy left. I think I'm starting to see a pattern though in riding better 1-2 days after a hard ride, I'll have to see about that though. I'm happy with yesterday, so I'll take it.

rkwaki

Love this post Ex.
Like Ex said everyone, Froome et al, gets dropped at some point... Getting back after it is what builds character/strength/respect/etc.

teetopkram

+1

Jandro 

This should be stickied somewhere.

Jaytron

Well said.

Fat Boy

Boy, were my legs carp today. I had some pretty good form going, but a couple work trips and a family vacation took their toll, I guess.

Fat Boy

1000%