I say I race bikes. I find that I say it less frequently than I used to. Partly that's down to the pandemic, but partly it's down to refocusing on other things that matter a whole lot more than carbon and lycra. But I still say it, just the same.
I used to be pretty excited about it. Even as recently as February I was restructuring my year to set my sights on racing gravel and changing my training blocs from Zwift 1-hour max-efforts to multi-hour mixed-bag efforts.
Last Fall I did a season of Zwift Racing League that, while fun, kinda ruined my perspective on my own fitness and abilities. My 4.5W/kg and estimated VO2 Max of 62, which under almost any other circumstances would have been considered damned good, were insufficient to finish even a single race in the pack, and a 45-second 800W sprint was only good enough for 2nd place in an intermediate sprint, followed by immediately being dropped from the pack. Add an utter inability to read the race strategy and I didn't feel like I was holding up my end of the bargain for the team.
Since my power was already "good enough", I shifted away from ZRL to start thinking about Monstercross, which is always a hard race, but a great early-season test. And yes I met all my goals, but with a result that was much worse than in years prior, and it became instantly evident that Zwift was actually representative of the changing face of cycling: people are truly stronger and fitter than they were in 2019.
No worries: I'd have 3 months to build fitness for Grinder Nationals (100 miles, 6200', 80% gravel) in May, and I signed up for a 3-race series of progressively longer & steeper gravel races to gauge my progress.
It hasn't gone to plan.
The first race saw much the same issues I'd seen at Monstercross: I can start strong, but I run out of give-a-shit much faster than I used to. Within 30 minutes of the start I was off the pace, and by 35 miles I just wanted to quit.
The 2nd race...I skipped. Kids had been sick, work, yadda yadda. Plus it snowed on race-day, and just f* that nonsense. Lots of excuses.
Then the kids got super crazy sick and we went on vacation and I missed the whole week of training before the 3rd event, and it produced not only the worst race result I've ever had for actually finishing a race, but the highest relative effort I've ever seen for anything on a bike. My fitness wasn't improving: it was getting worse, and I had to walk the bike significant portions of the steep hills and still ended up with some of the worst cramping I've ever experienced.
One of the challenges I face at this time of year is an absolute hatred of Zwift. If it's even remotely tolerable to be outside, I won't get on Zwift. But my schedule doesn't really permit me to do many group rides, so it's solo or nothing. Alastair isn't even doing road with me because he's having a fantastic season of mountain bike racing, which is great, and gives me an opportunity to get a dedicated 2-hour block 3 times a week. But it's all solo, and it's so much easier to just ride "hard enough" when you're alone.
So I got permission to do a couple of group rides at non-standard times just to see how my fitness stacked up, and hoo boy not good. In the first, a ride I can usually do all summer long, I was nearly dropped in the first 3 miles. I rallied and stayed with it, but it was a surprise, and my average power was nowhere near what it had been last year.
In the 2nd, I was dropped HARD in about 5 miles. It was embarrassingly bad. So bad that I decided to pivot back to that skipped gravel race and just ride its course over the following weekend...which was the 2nd worst gravel ride I've ever done, and left me wondering just what, exactly, it is I think I enjoy about this sport.
If it's the racing, I'm not in the shape for that. If it's the adventuring, I sure as shit didn't enjoy that this weekend. If it's the people, I barely get to see them, and the people I like riding with hate gravel. It could be the time I get to myself, but even that gets old after a while.
So yeah I guess I race bikes? But maybe not because Alastair's having such a good time racing mountain bikes that we're canceling our participation in Grinder Nationals so he can focus on his points-standing in his current series. He hates gravel anyway so it's no big loss for him, and there's no way on God's green Earth that I could manage 100 miles on gravel right now.
I did just throw some money at the gravel bike to FINALLY embrace a mullet setup for the steeper stuff, but every time I get the TIME to test it the weather turns to shit. So...Zwift.
It's 80-degrees outside today, the sun has been shining, and there's about a 90% chance that the only way I ride today is on the hamster wheel.
I hate what I love.
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