At this point in time I am thinking
of putting my fitness journal material into a blog. I want to edit the posts so
that they don’t suck if I am going to do that though. Once they reach a level
of relevance I will add them to the blog, but for now they will remain on my hard drive
awaiting correction. So if you were confused by the Entry No. 17 part of the title, that should clear it up. If you're still confused, deload to hooked on phonics or something.
Most fitness blogs have the problem
of being pointless. Often they will just give lift numbers or miles
ran/swam/biked/etc. I find it ridiculous to read such things. It is like
watching paint dry. The other end of the spectrum is when a person just gives
artsy bullshit about their chosen sporting activity. It’s fine to have that for
yourself, but I don’t think other people should care that much. It is true that
sport has a romantic quality for many people. Pushing yourself until you can’t
anymore is a beautiful image that is a perfect and relatable way to define
ideas like struggle, defiance, and overcoming adversity. Not everyone cares
though.
It’s great if you did a workout
that showed you some great new meaning. It’s fine if you gain your own life
philosophy from your training methods. I encourage people to help find meaning
in their life through exercise because it’s a way less bleak picture than
gaining these thoughts from our work habits. In most parts of the world now
people work very hard for decades in the hope that they won’t have to for a few
more. Spending fifty hours a week for fifty years toiling away at some sort of
job will inevitably turn you into a miserable bastard. I’ve seen it happen to
my parents, and I hope desperately that it doesn’t happen to me.
As a result of this I find myself
constantly re-examining my goals as a person. Where do I want to be in life?
How will I achieve these things? A nice, and much lower stress, set of goals to
achieve occur in sport. I decided to be a competitive cyclist when I got to
university. I found the team by accident. I was telling a fraternity recruiter
why I couldn’t be in their fraternity, and he was scouting possible philanthropy
work that night that happened to be at the cycling meeting. I was ecstatic. I
used to bike all the time. I had put some training in that August in fact. I
did a grand total of 1 team ride that year. It was 50 miles, and it sucked. I
was in no shape to do it, but I did. It hurt. I was unable to bring myself to
riding because I figured every ride would be like that. If somebody had told me
doing a series of 20-30 mile rides would be a much better representation of
what the team normally does I would have been more likely to participate more.
I should have raced that year. I could have learned my lessons an entire year
earlier if I had just had the balls to. Anxiety causes really poor judgment
though; I’ll get into that more later.
The next year I did 2 training
rides. Yeah, I am not showing a great amount of commitment here, but I feel the
need to be honest about it. If we lie about our failures to prepare, then we
have no excuse for them. If you train hard, and you lose the way I did in
racing last year, then you should sell your bike and find something else to do.
I hadn’t ridden a bike in months when I got up to that start line. I was
nervous for obvious reasons. I knew I was going to be bad, but I was much worse
than I expected. I got dropped after 1 mile. You read that correctly. I did
horribly. As soon as we got onto the gravel I let everyone else go. I flatted
out at mile 8. The next race I stayed for 7 miles. The race after that I lasted
a whole 15. My season ended with that one, and I have improved so much that I
could win that race if I tried today. Well, not today today. I’m still sore from squats yesterday. If we held a 35
mile race on Saturday I would smash it though.
So here I am at the end of
November. I am sitting here in my room next to some empty soda cans, textbooks,
and cycling books. For dinner I had a banana and a protein shake. Tomorrow I’ve
got bench press, some rowing, and some stretching on the menu. I am in better
shape than I could ever have expected. I have not let one week go by without a
really hard workout. I have a legitimate plan to work my way into dominant race
shape this year. I know what it takes after a couple of failures.
I hope this post has provided a
good background for you on my sporting history as well as where I mean to go. I
am a cyclist who lifts weights. Eventually I want to do an Ironman. I want to
get better at both cycling and lifting, but as next semester approaches I will
lift a lot less. During the season I will be doing probably one bench session a
week, and the rest will be cycling. Racing every weekend takes a lot out of
you. If you have any advice, feel free to send it my way. I am open to other’s
opinions, but if you are plain wrong I will ignore you most likely. I know a
decent amount when it comes to both resistance training and endurance training.
When I include any of the first 16
posts in this blog I will mention what post number it is, and I will tell you
roughly the date I wrote it. Some of this shit is a year old or even a bit
older. It may have a few dumbass statements from a kid who had never raced
before. If you have any questions about cycling, since I know many of the
readers I will likely have know fuck all about exercise that is not lifting,
just ask. I’m not perfect when it comes to physiological knowledge, but I am a
good jumping off point. I hope you didn’t die of boredom in the time it took to
read this, and before you do I will end it here.
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