Keeping Tempo: 6-26-08

My dad is a fanatic gardener. He's spent an incredible amount of time getting everything to grow just right, but now is a slave to his past efforts. If he leaves it for a week or even a few days without tending, weeding, watering, dead-heading, pruning, picking, whatever, there's just no guarantee that it's going to stay at its peak. And what if the guy next door doesn't go out of town, and his garden starts to flourish at the same time my dad's starts to look a little tired?

Sound familiar? How many workouts do you slog through simply because of all the time you've invested so far in the season? It'd be nice to catch a break, but at what expense? The sunk costs of early season training show up in the budget all year. They're a great motivator, but they're expensive.

I bring this up for a couple of reasons. 1) to point out that cyclists aren't the only ones who are fanatical about our pursuits. There are millions of other normal people out there who are as crazy as we are.

And 2) because I've been thinking about this thermometer my dad has hanging on the screen porch at his house. It's a big round one with a needle, and at the different temperature increments it reads something like this:

30 degrees: Ground frozen, no gardening
40: too cold for gardening
50: too brisk for gardening
60: too windy for gardening
70: too nice for gardening
80: too sunny for gardening
90: too humid for gardening
100: too hot for gardening

I think we need a thermometer like that for cycling, particularly to remind the guys I race against us all that' it's OK to take a day or two off. It's a perfect prisoner's dilemma we're in. We can't possibly scale it back a notch because our competition might not. But if everyone were to all take a breather together, the playing field wouldn't change, yet we'd all remember what real life feels like.

That wasn't supposed to run on that long. All I really meant to say was:

• The American Eagle Outfitter Tour of PA is getting some TV coverage on VS. Highlights are on at 6pm every night through the weekend, beginning yesterday (Wednesday). Tell your DVR.
• The Service Course has an examination of the "Hey Lance" phenomenon. Normally he writes about the pro peloton but this is another one of those articles at the intersection of vocation and avocation, relevant to all of us mortals as well.
• Girloffroad really wears her heart on her tanline in this one. She takes a look at her nervousness and what she needs to do to ride in its slipstream and ultimately attack it, particularly leading up to the Reston Town Center Grand Prix, which is the tour de butterflies for a lot of us I think. (It was a peak for you last year, Pete. Maybe it will be again.)

Comments

[Karen]

Very cool write-up! Just substitute cycling

30 degrees: Ground frozen, no cycling
40: too cold for cycling
50: too brisk for cycling
60: too windy for cycling
70: too nice for cycling
80: too sunny for cycling
90: too humid for cycling
100: too hot for cycling

And you have a lot of rest days!!!

[Mike May]

True, though we would probably have to just about invert everything for the CX crowd:

30 degrees: Ground frozen, out of town for Nationals
40 degrees and rainy: too nice for CX
50 degrees: too sunny for CX
60 degrees: too hot for CX
70-100: no salt on roads, no CX racing

[MB]

Today was definitely in the too hot column. I think there were all of six of us or something at Hains. Which was probably six too many.