THRESHOLD WORK

Today was a great day. Started out early this morning with a couple hours of hiking up in the mountains with the wife and kids bow hunting for the elusive wapiti. No wapiti today, but we had a great time hiking and letting the kids blow the elk calls. We saw some elk tracks, a wallow, some deer, and got some good old fashioned excercise to boot.

This afternoon was so nice that I wanted to go out for a fun ride on the mountain or 'cross bike up in the woods, but I did that yesterday, and today I needed to get some good threshold work in. We (me and my 'cross bike, Chili) headed out to a flat section of highway where there's room for some good long intervals. I did three 20 minute full on threshold efforts. The first wasn't to bad, the second one hurt a little, and the third one was torture. I wanted to quit after about 5 minutes, but tried to ignore the pain and pushed it hard 'til the end. It's times like these that I always remember a saying that my old high school football coach used to tell us, "The body can go longer than the mind wants to let it." I think most competative cyclist know the deal on that. Often times when it's hurtin' bad, all you want to do is stop pedaling. You have to ignore the pain, or even learn to like it, and make yourself keep going. You have to train your mind, as well as your body to be a cyclocross racer, because usually about 5 minutes into a 60 minute race you're on the rivet and hurting bad, but you gotta keep pushing. I have a little mantra I repeat over and over in my head when it gets tough, "Gotta suffer to win, gotta suffer to win." Doing something like that can help take your mind off of the pain, and if you don't think about the searing pain in your legs and or lungs, it's not really there, is it? Easier said than done, I know.

Anyways, I had a great ride today and did the work I needed to do. 2 1/2 hrs total with the threshold intervals and the rest mostly zone 2 or 3. The TSS ended up at 193, and I am going to try and squeeze in a little run and some core work this evening, since I havn't done that for a few days. More fun to be had.

Keep it PURE,
Brad