Thursday, October 15, 2015

Carpe half an hour

Time waits for no man. You're telling me! Work is a stinker lately and I'm continually reduced to 30-40 minute slots. You really have to be committed to get some training done in that time because it just happens to be the same amount of time needed to get to a café, down a flat white, remove a slice of fruit crumble from this earth and get back to work. Its a tight-rope folks!
 I leave a two euro coin for [chocolate] emergencies in my pocket but not enough for the above goodies, keep my kit and carbon rocket in the car and change quicker than a mother-in-law's mood. There's always choices out there of what lightning session to do, be it torque, St. Bernard's or sprints. But what I do is not the point. Its the why. 30-40 minutes of escape may only be an insignificant session to a 15-hours-a-week-great-white-hope... but for me to manually disengage my work gears and engage my inner Mesolithic man instead keeps me alive. I need that sweating, grunting, all-out hunter-gatherer time to achieve a number of outcomes....Letting off steam for example. Everyone has stress. Mine doesn't come from work or the wife and kids but I do still need to clear the mental cogs and let it out. My poor SCOTT is a great listener. 
                                          And what about that base instinct all men have, one step up from dragging our fists on the ground? That beating-your-chest, crazed, glazed-over rage that is in our DNA? These days it is deftly hidden by man-bags, after-shave, I-phones and metrosexualism. But its still there, and wants to get out too. I let it off it's feral, musky leash in a tunnel of creatine phosphate pain that I call training. 
And there's another reason. I am a paid-up member of the Anti-Man-Cave, Turbo and Rollers League. I don't want to go indoors, twist my gut while whirring like a dairy and come out staggering, fighting for my life.[ Or the light switch anyway.] No offence meant, I mean those that do Zwift are way fitter, it just is not my scene. Everyone to themselves. But I ain't a cycling grizzly that takes it's electrolytes, gels and CYCLING magazine underground for five months. Give me daylight. Give me a road. In fact, give me five minutes and I'll be ready!

Friday, October 9, 2015

Old haunts

I once rode from my house out of town to Inistioge, up by Woodstock and back to the bridge in 'Ross and stopped the clock outside Swan's Chinese at 59 minutes and 59 seconds. I can therefore boast that I did the loop of truth in 'under an hour'. Thats great. Except I have never been able to beat it. That day five years ago everything was perfect; wind, fitness, bike. And every spin I do flat-out on that circuit hurts because....But it doesn't really matter. I do LOVE that circuit 'though. You see, if time is tighter than a duck's butt its the place to head. Take today...I'm trying to build power so I rode tempo on the climbs and did 4x1s in between. I didn't have a flat bit of road. Its always undulating or, on the hills [Clodiagh/Woodstock/Ballyneale/Tullogher]bloody steep. Build power, build glutes, do high cadence climbing, hone descending skills, and all in nearly an hour. Ish. Its not a route that bores either, it has more twists and turns than snakes and ladders, more colours than an LGBT flag and more history than Paris Hilton's bed sheets. I love it because its all or nothing. If you ain't committed it'll bite you badly. No point in trying to get yourself up Woodstock if you ain't feeling the love. At the moment I'm getting at the killer loop once a week, tears in my eyes, veins out, ploughing over the sleeping policemen in Rosbercon to get to Swan's restaurant in under...well...not quite...give or take...well I ain't getting any younger...!

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Race of the falling leaves

I've used so many superlatives to try and explain what Autumn is for me ,yet I've always failed as its just impossible. Robert Frost does it much better, even James Lee Burke has gotten it down adequately on paper. I thought it was the smells, the air, the warmth, the wind direction, the harvests, the ploughing, the onset of something harsh in the atmosphere....But its all those and none. Because Autumn is a frame of mind. And this year we've been steeped in luck to watch the crab-apples grow to imitate small turnips, to wear shorts into October, to cycle our bikes always wearing too much. I'm not going to bother describing anymore, theres no point in trying to paint you a picture of peach and yellow jet-stream cloud at dusk, of kids playing 'til dark in the yard or the onset of ink-like night in seconds. The swallows have left, the bats have had their bellyfuls. Sunday saw the rain arrive and the wind rise, the last race of the season in Oylegate, a quick goodbye 'til the days lengthen again. The oil trucks are about, smoke rises steeply and woodsmoke or bark resin is filling noses in every neighbourhood. Autumn is my New Year's. You can say what you want but nothing really changes over 31st December/ 1st January except the intensity of your hangover. Its still bloody cold out, the car is covered in a rime of frost, gym workouts, fad diets, even lifting your ass off a couch is alien to the conditions. No, the Fall is where its at. I like to go INTO the depths of Winter in a mindset of change. I don't want to batten down the hatches...I want to throw them wide open, breathe in that turned-earth smell, drink the beetroot juice that tastes like it came out of the ground because it did, or eat a windfall apple as I watch the kids kicking a rich store of leaves. I loved racing on Sunday, book-ended with 40 kms of banter, loved chatting to the people that made the 2015 cycling season a pleasure to be part of. Autumn changes everything and changes nothing but it's the pivotal season of the year for me. "THERE CAME THIS DAY AND HE WAS AUTUMN, HIS MOUTH WAS WIDE AND RED AS A SUNSET, AND HIS TAIL WAS AN ICICLE" Ted Hughes