This morning, I exercised one of the most divine recovery period privileges on the list of recovery period privileges.<\/p>\n
First, rewind a little…<\/p>\n
Hard training is hard. It sounds redundant, but it’s true. It’s not just the intensity, fatigue, or any of the obvious stuff. It’s that, if you want to win (or, maybe even more importantly, to at least know that, if you don’t win, you did EVERYTHING in your power to train to win), you have to train religiously. All weather, all the time, never missing a hard day, whether you want to or not.<\/p>\n
It’s what separates the podium from the pack fill.<\/p>\n
I trained hard for Worlds.<\/p>\n
Back to this morning. I’d been hankering all week to go on a wiley Saturday group road ride and even gained permission to join in on a 4hr Marx-Bensdorf team hammer ride. Matt (who rides with BPC, the M-B farm team) joined me, and we bundled up and headed out to the meet-up spot. It was cloudy, cold, damp, and windy. We were running a couple of minutes late, so I tempo-rode the two of us the half hour there.<\/p>\n
Once we arrived, the group chatted then rolled out within a couple of minutes. The testosterone was strong straight from the parking lot- one of the guys sat on the front and pulled straight into the North headwind at what was likely a 300 watt effort on his part. Matt vocalized what no one else would say when he explained how much the cold and effort sucked. He was exactly right. I told him he should HTFU<\/a> and grind out the remaining 3.5 hours.<\/p>\n I turned off and went home.<\/p>\n Part of recovery (at least for me) is letting the HTFU part of your brain take a break for a minute. It’s sort of a “return to being normal for a minute” thing. Now I’m warm, cozy, and giddy with the thought of having the privilege to go home when my hands and feet are frozen solid while the out-of-the-lot pace is faster than the tempo I was riding when we were running late. Maybe I’ll go really crazy and have a beer with lunch. There’s no telling.<\/p>\n
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