Recovery Ride

Recovery Ride (1/5/2011)

Since the start of what I thought would be a great resolution this year of getting out and doing something I love, I’ve had a few concerned friends about the long run of my goal. I think today is a good day to write about this because it needs to get addressed sooner or later, and since today’s ride was one of recover, it seems appropriate. The main concern as always is preventing injury. Since my goal is to ride every day this year, it follows that I have no days for true “recovery”.  Before I press on with recovery, I want to address the other issue that’s been brought up: burn out.

Because of swimming my whole life, I’ve seen plenty of friends go through burn out. During my senior year of high school, I experienced it as well for about 2.5 months. Some friends felt that swimming had become too monotonous, some had injuries to deal with and never really got back into the flow of things, and some had just been swimming since age 5 and had had enough. In my experience, I had a little bit of a falling out with swimming, I had been busting my butt working for my Eagle Scout rank in Boy Scouts, and I just didn’t have the time to train. In light of how little training I was doing, my times suffered, and because of that, I began to feel burnt out.

Now I hope I don’t eat my words later on in the year, but I just don’t see that happening to me with this year of cycling. Granted I’m at school full time, trying to balance two jobs, a girlfriend, a social life, and two other sports, every time I strap into my shoes and head out for a ride is like my first ride all over again. Sure nowadays I’m mostly out to train, kill myself on some uphills, bomb some downhills, and compete as much as I can against my team mates, but every time I ride I think the same thing: “today’s a beautiful day for a ride, I can’t believe that this play thing is providing me with a work out, gosh it’s beautiful out why don’t I appreciate this while I’m driving in my car, and I should do this every day”. So far the only way I foresee burn out in my future is if there’s some God awful rain storm that keeps me indoors for over a week and a half.

Back to RECOVERY! In capitals, because yes, I understand how important it is to my training. I understand the mechanics, I understand what I’m putting my body through, and for the umpteenth time, I know I need rest. I know that The chances of injury go up the longer and harder I ride.

 The thing is, I got this crazy idea in my head to take up a challenge. I’ve been so hit and miss on being consistent on works ever since I left a truly structured team, why not? I’m driven, I love the sport since my first road bike was given to me as a gift by my girlfriend, I see myself doing this for as long as possible, and I’m competitive. I want to compete against myself as much as I want to compete against my team mates. If that means I compete against myself on my trainer or on the road, so be it.  I want to ride every day, and because of that, I’m going to ride every day.

Back to today’s ride. My goal is to put in miles, and today did that at the lowest possible rate. I think the hardest thing about today’s ride was that I wouldn’t let myself push… myself. Normally I like to catch everyone’s wheel on the street, but since today was a recovery ride, I had to literally force myself to take the ride slow. Half way through I stopped in at Irvine Bikes, definitely one of if not my favorite bike shops around for a quick check up on the bike. After hanging out for a bit, cruised back home before some refueling at Corner Bakery.  Looking forward to riding with a few of the CSULB Triathlon crew tomorrow morning and writing about it later.

(picture of Moe protecting Irvine Bikes)