Well… depending on who you ask, I either ride my bike way too much—or not nearly enough.
Regardless, riding my bike gives me a lot of time to reflect and it’s part of the reason I enjoy riding so much. It’s also why I like racing, but maybe that is for another day.
Training brings structure—and structure brings intervals. Interesting enough I never did “intervals” when I participated in other sports, at least not in the same highly structured sense. So I’m relatively new to interval training.
The biggest thing I have learned is that we are not machines and not every interval session will be perfect. This is especially true with me. Life happens, maybe you didn’t get a good night’s sleep or maybe you are worried about a family member. These things impact us. It’s easy to set targets for your training, IE do 10 minutes at X power 4 times. Then you roll out and 8 minutes into your first session you want to die and you start negotiating with yourself. I have this bad habit of beating myself up. If I don’t meet or exceed my interval expectations the negative thoughts start winning. “You are slow”, “Why do you even try”, “Your power numbers are weak”, “You will never succeed in a race”
That isn’t healthy.
While I’m not advocating that we easily give up mid interval, pushing through the mental blockage it’s a skill in its own right. What I am advocating for is keeping a healthy mental attitude. It’s better to have a future of bad intervals than no cycling future. Meaning, don’t burn yourself out. Embrace that there will bad days because there will also be good days where you crush your intervals. Without having a bad session the good ones will never come. So keep showing up, keep pushing hard. Become the best version of yourself and remember, even MVP has off days.
Maybe I go back to my first bike related memory. It was a batman bike with training wheels. We lived on a gravel road with a gravel driveway and I remember the only place I could ride was on the small sidewalk from the garage to the front door. Then at some point I got the training wheels off (strider kids will never know that joy). From then on my mom would load me and my sister up in our mini van and head into town. We road in random parking lots and got asked to leave a handful of times.
Fast forward a few years and I’m saving all my money to buy this mongoose mountain bike from Walmart, it couldn’t have been more than 100 dollars. I must have saved for so long. I don’t have a picture of it but it looked something like this. If I recall the decals were yellow instead of red.
It’s funny because I don’t remember much of that bike, just a specific memory of me cruising around the playground when we went on a camping trip. A random kid was trying to get me to ride a wheelie, which I couldn’t do. I do remember he was eating paper, hopefully he made it out the other side okay.
Then like most everyone, the small things you enjoy as a child become childish. I stopped riding bikes and started playing soccer. I was never a great soccer player if I’m being honest. I played in HS and on a top tier club, but was one of the weaker players. Then my high school coach made me hate soccer. His practices were just punishments, run until you puke or until the sun goes down. Nothing was fun and my senior year I was subbed out with 5 minutes left of our final game. It made me angry then, we were gonna lose, at least let me finish my last game. I didn’t play again for almost 5 years.
Then in college I wanted a bike again. I ended up getting a hard tail mountain bike. I used it to ride between classes, I made a lot of people angry as I zipped between them walking. One morning I got up early and took it to the local single track. I got covered in so many spiderwebs I never went back. I was also dealing with spondylolisthesis (back problems) and while riding a bike was okay, walking was another story.
I graduated college and started working at an IT company. I moved in with my best friend from highschool and we bought used road bikes off of craigslist. Mine was a trek 1000 sl. It was nothing special and back then I didn’t know much about bikes. It had skinny tires you pumped up to 90psi (at least) and it felt fast as you went 17mph. I still didn’t love bikes, it was something to get me places or to spend a few minutes outside. A few times I commuted to work, but didn’t track heart rate or power and I didn’t even know you could.
Soon I moved again and my job location was even further away so my bike just collected dust. Years went by and all I did was drink and work. What can I say, I was in my early 20s and that’s what all my friends did too.
Now in my early 30s, COVID happened and somehow bikes came back into my radar. I started looking at buying a gravel bike and I’m not even sure why. I knew about the Katy trail and I would dream of just quitting my job and riding. If you have a desk job sometimes just going outside and doing something else. I finally splurged and bought a Trek Checkpoint SL5. It was way more money than I had ever spent on a bike. As luck would have it a few coworkers heard me talking about the Katy trail and said they were going to bike across Missouri next year and that I should join. I was eager and just bought a bike so I agreed that I would go with them.
The trip was going to be 3 days of 100 mile days and I had a year to prepare. I didn’t have a real training plan and just started riding as much as I could, an hour here or there maybe 3 times a week if I was lucky. Winter showed up and I bought an indoor trainer so I could keep riding and hopefully train for the 3 day tour. I bought bags and before I knew it the weekend of riding was here.
It’s funny to go back and look at my setup, so many things I would do differently now. I didn’t know better and it worked out just fine in the end. This trip was the beginning of my cycling obsession and I feel in love with bikes. It’s how I started training and wanting to ride more.
Ramblings of a Cyclist 