Flat-Lander

I've been pretty enamored with the pursuit recently. This always tends to happen in the summer months. In 2008, I was transfixed by the state TT. Last year, it was the U23 nats TT, and now I'm getting all fuzzy feeling about the pursuit. Maybe I like to focus on races where there are fewer variables. Maybe I'm always disoriented, form-wise, after collegiate road nationals, which I've always aimed for pretty heavily, and I want to have a finite goal that I can wrap my head around. The last few summers, I get all detail oriented, making my equipment all nice, doing my homework about the course, and generally being pretty single-minded about the event I picked.

This year I think my understanding of training is a lot different, and it's changing the way I approach my event of choice. For instance, in 2008, I did hardly any racing in July because I was "preparing" for the state TT (I really wanted to win the Cat3 race). I rode my TT bike all the time, but when I look back, I was kind of a pussy about training hard. Same goes for last year. I never really got into the rhythm of hard training in the months before the event. I noticed these things at the end of last year, so after collegiate road nats this year, I really wanted to focus on getting back to a feeling of homeostasis in training. It took until the beginning of July, but it came around. And so this year, I've been focusing on getting race miles in the legs, since that's what "fills the right." It also means racing pursuits. Like I said, they remind me of swimming, and like swimming events, you get a little more familiar and comfortable with them each time.

I've got two little training mantras that might seem incompatible, but that I think actually go perfectly well together. The first is "I'm always training." This one's pretty simple; I just mean that preparing for training rides and for races is a constant process that involves rest, nutrition, stress, and a million other variables. So if training is a 24-hour thing, then you're always somewhere on the thread of training you've strung. There's a trajectory associated with your point on the string, and your training 'status' changes gradually and (usually) without discontinuity. Now when you look at the 2 minutes immediately prior to the start of a pursuit, there's very little that you can do in your training to prepare yourself for the event any further. Everything is already "in the bank," so to speak. So before setting off, I clear my head by telling myself that I've got "money in the bank" and that my legs are about to "buy me a drink." I think this is pretty liberating, since all the consideration that goes into training is unnecessary during a pursuit. Instead, I can just focus on accepting more pain.

With that in mind, I went to the Elite Nats qualifier on Saturday, where it started raining 5 minutes before my heat against Dan Harm. It was okay though, because I had been meaning to get in some 40-minute roller rides on a Saturday. Instead, I raced it on Monday. It was a 5:03.8, down from 5:12.3 three weeks ago. I tried some different pacing:

AVC:
Nats Qualifier:

Lastly, this is the best warm-up song ever.