Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

I feel like this blog should be a Seinfield episode as it's probably about nothing.

I've shifted into a new phase of my training. More time on the TT bike now and more time doing high power intervals. This last week or so has been interesting because I've done intervals where I have been riding hard and then I would surge from that. What I'm seeing is that I can ride at a pretty high power output (something I knew) but that when I try to add much to that, it's really, really hard (something that's a bit surprising). I can ride at 300 watts for an hour or more but if I try to ride at 400 watts I can only do that for about a minute before I feel like my lungs are going to explode. This is only an increase of 33% where I feel as if my competitors can double their power output in a surge. So this is what I'm trying to train up. I need to be able to get this "surge power" up higher if I'm going to hang with the other riders in a pack when they surge (like on a power climb) or if I'm going to jump out of a pack and make a break stick. A hoped for added benefit is that it'll also raise the level of power I can put out for an hour which will be good for my time trialing.

This last couple of weeks have also been really powerful spiritually. We celebrated Passover, Easter and Orthodox Pascha all in the last two weeks and the combination just continued to build in terms of the symbolism and the joy of concluding Lent. Being able to lead the college students in our campus ministry through this as well made the time even more special. This is the one time of the year when I wish I could take a two week sabbatical from all my other responsibilities in order to focus on living a liturgical life. Of course, that would require being able to find a church that had such a liturgical life that also matched up with both my theological beliefs and, to a lesser extent, my beliefs on how the faith is to practiced. Orthodoxy and orthopraxy. I really do miss having a community of faith to worship through this time with. I love our student community but we aren't a church and we don't do worship together very often. I wish I could find a church that practiced a true orthopraxy of inclusion instead of the much more common orthodoxy of exclusion.

Anyways, we're moving to the close of the academic year. Some students are stressing, some are working and some are coming to terms with the fact that they won't fulfill their educational goals at this time. That's always an interesting process to observe; being very much the stages of grief. There is always an initial denial, followed by anger at the school and the professors and other students and just life in general. Accusations are made, fingers are pointed, things get broken and difficult words are said. This is a turbulent time where the person student swings back and forth between goals and relationships and generally creates an enormous amount of drama in the lives of the people around them. At some point there is a general sense of sorrow and withdrawal that takes place. The student is sort of seen as having given up by those around them though in reality they've finally stopped fighting the reality of their failure and they've started trying to come to terms with it. Not only do they not attend classes much but they often cut off friends, stop going to some activities and even leave school altogether. This can be a dangerous time if the student identifies too strongly with the sense of failure they feel as they can give up hope in a much broader way which isn't good. Many students will retreat to substance abuse while fewer (but not few enough) will contemplate something much more permanent. Finally, often at a time long after they've left school, the student comes to a state of acceptance where they are ready to take responsibility for what went wrong and to understand what went right. If they do this while still at the school there is sort of a peace that comes over their remaining time where they cherish their time with the friends they likely won't see again and the activities they are going to enjoy before going into a world that leaves less time for such things. In any case, it isn't until this time that a person is ready to look at doing school again. Too often, societal pressures and a relapse into a state of denial will send a student back into the academic environment before they are ready.

So that about wraps it up on my various musings and such. Maybe I'll try to write something positive about my good students in the next update.

Thanks for Reading.

The Physicist   Link Me    |

Monday, April 06, 2009

This weekend was the last race in the early season block-Chattanooga. What started in Powder Springs at the Tundra Time Trial ended with an Omnium event on both sides of the Georgia/Tennessee border.

A few thoughts on the racing. I decided to race with the Masters field to see if I was ready to do that full time and to see if I should ask to cat up. If I go by my time trial results that answer is an unqualified yes. It was my best TT to date on a power-style course and I won my classification and took second overall if you take out the Pro/1/2 field. I beat all the 3's and most of the 2's which was the best I've done all year. On the downside, I got dropped in both the crit and the road race events which means that I'm probably not quite ready to move up yet. So, I'll race the next quarter with the 4's and see if I can improve both my crit skills and my short term power in order to be able to hang with the surges. I have a ton more long term power than most of the guys I'm racing with but I don't have the same power for stuff under about 6 minutes.

For the first three months of racing I have to be pretty pleased. Five wins for five in the time trials I finished (and I'm sure I would have won the TT I flatted in), a podium in a road race and a podium in an omnium are good results. I still need a lot of improvement to get to my goal of making cat 3 but I can see winning the state TT championship from where I'm at. I still think I need to improve some things but some of that is equipment that I'll be able to invest in over the next two months and some will come with the eight weeks of training I'll get to do. My biggest concern is that some of the guys racing in the Pro/1/2 field are going to be in the 40-44 age group with me when the state TT happens and so I do have to race them and so I need to improve a bit more.

Right now I'm wiped out. I'm sore in a dozen places from this weekend's racing on top of the last three months. As physically tired as I am, I'm just as exhausted mentally. Racing takes a mental toll on you as you deal with the stress of worrying about crashing, staying in hotel rooms a lot and eating out too much. Staying home last week was a really big help and I'm looking forward to not doing a mass start race until late May. April and May is crit season down here in the south with some NRC events and a big crit series spread through the cities of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Alabama. For me, I'll have a couple of time trials before then but they're a lot easier to deal with and the travel requirements are pretty light. If we can ever get some weather conducive to riding outside (which would not be today with our 40 mph winds), I'm really looking forward to going out and getting reacquainted with some of the local roads.

At what's just about the halfway mark of the season, I'm happy with what I've accomplished but there's still a lot more to do. Thanks for reading and I'll check back in soon.

The Physicist   Link Me    |